To better understand vegetation succession in the Los Angeles, California basin, modern aerial photos (1980) were measured and compared to older aerial photos (1928 & 1936), spanning roughly 50 years of vegetation change. Through this comparison, the authors found that shrublands and grasslands formed a dynamic mosaic.
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These researchers did extensive studies of postfire recovery following the 2002 McNally Fire in Sequoia National Forest and compared ancient stands of chaparral with younger stands.
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This study showed that fire-adapted shrublands are vulnerable to changes in fire regime, leading to loss of native diversity and setting the community on a trajectory towards type conversion from a woody to an herbaceous system.
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Read MoreResearchers used 29 years of historical fire mapping to quantify the relationship between annual wildfire area and previous fire area in seven California counties to address the question of prescribed fire effectiveness in these counties.
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A Bayesian Network model was used to evaluate the relative importance of fuel and fuel treatments compared to weather and variables of the built and natural environment on wildfire risk at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in San Diego County.
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A study published in Ecology Letters suggests that the effects of drought and fire work in combination, such that forests experiencing drought will see more dead trees in the aftermath of wildfires.
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The author examines social perceptions of risk of home ignition in the community of Forest Ranch, which is located in the Sierra-Cascade foothills near Chico in Butte County.
Read MoreThese authors utilized annual fire data from the early 20th century to 2010 to evaluate historical changes in fires and the extent to which annual variations in climate were correlated with fires.
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This study focuses on reducing fire ignition, specifically on discerning the most destructive ignition sources so that they might be targeted by managers.
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A 2015 study by Meyer showed that the natural range of variation (NRV) concept and key fire severity indicators could be used to quantitatively evaluate the landscape-scale effects of large wildfires managed for resource objectives.
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The authors evaluated current USFS standards and guidelines, input from forest management practitioners, and geospatial data to develop a hierarchy of biological (i.e., nonproductive forest), legal (i.e., wilderness), operational (i.e., equipment access), and administrative (i.e., sensitive species and riparian areas) constraints on mechanical treatments.
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This 1952 study is a questionably designed attempt to measure wildlife survival during prescribed fire. The most dubious part of the project involves burying live-‐trapped animals in the path of a controlled burn.
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Presented here is scientific information regarding wildland fire and nonnative invasive plant species, identifies the nonnative invasive species currently of greatest concern in major bioregions of the United States, and describes emerging fire-invasive issues in each bioregion and throughout the nation.
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The authors used spatial analyses to describe major wildfire patterns across a 5.8 million acre area of northwestern California.
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California leads the nation in fire losses and the explanation for this is that with more than 33 million people, California has a fire regime that is dominated by human ignitions.
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This study investigated internal and external influences on fire management through case studies of two wildfires in the summer of 2008.
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This review article summarizes the biological risks to chaparral species depending on fire return interval.
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This study examined the historical fire intervals of two chaparral-dominated divisions of the Los Padres National Forest, California.
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This 2003 study used aerial photos taken between 1939 and 1997 to quantify vegetation change in the landscape mosaic of grasslands, shrublands, woodlands and forests of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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This brief discussed a 2012 study that indicates less than 20% of national forest and national park lands in the Sierra Nevada are experiencing fuels treatments needed to mitigate continuing degradation from either the lack of fire or wildfire burning at high severity.
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The California Fire Science Consortium is divided into 4 geographic regions and 1 wildland-urban interface (WUI) team. Statewide coordination of this program is based at UC Berkeley.
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This regional Fire Science Exchange is one of 15 regional fire science exchanges.
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