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Fire and Fuels: Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project
From page 1 of the report:
"Fire is a natural evolutionary force that has influenced Sierran ecosystems for millennia, influencing biodiversity, plant reproduction, vegetation development, insect outbreak and disease cycles, wildlife habitat relationships, soil functions and nutrient cycling, gene flow, selection, and, ultimately, sustainability.
Climatic variation plays an important role in influencing fire patterns and severity; fires have been most extensive in periods of dry years.
In most lower-elevation oak woodland and conifer forest types of the Sierra Nevada, presettlement fires were frequent, collectively covered large areas, burned for months at a time, and, although primarily low to moderate in intensity, exhibited complex patterns of severity.
Fire suppression in concert with changing land-use practices has dramatically changed the fire regimes of the Sierra Nevada and thereby altered ecological structures and functions in Sierran plant communities.
Fuel Conditions Live and dead fuels in today’s conifer forests are more abundant and continuous than in the past.
Timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure, local microclimate, and fuel accumulation, has increased fire severity more than any other recent human activity.
The commonly expected consequence of decades of fire suppression—that large, infrequent fires are becoming larger and small, frequent fires smaller—is generally not confirmed by records for twentieth-century Sierran forests.
Although silvicultural treatments can mimic the effects of fire on structural patterns of woody vegetation, virtually no data exist on the ability to mimic ecological functions of natural fire.
Projected trends in urban settlement—homes intermixed with flammable wildlands—place an increasing number of homes and people at high risk of loss from wildfire unless hazards are mitigated."
fire and fuels, fire-ecological functions, fire-effects of climate, fire-presettlement regimes, fire-effects of suppression, fuel conditions, fire-effects of logging, fire size trends, fire surrogates, urban-wildlands intermix, historic fire-return intervals, fire-role and consequences of suppression, fire-careless and indiscriminate use, fire-development of vertical fuels, fire-prescribed, fire-challenges for management, Cleveland wildfire, fire risk, fire-surface fuel characteristics map, fire-management hazardous fuels, fire-defensible fuel profile zones, fire-historic maps
white pine, ponderosa pine, douglass fir
June 01, 1996 12:00 AM
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Sierra Nevada Mountains, California; El Dorado National Forest