In response to mounting wildfire risks, land managers across the country will need to dramatically increase proactive wildfire management (e.g. fuel and forest health treatments). While human communities vary widely in their vulnerability to the impacts of fire, these discrepancies have rarely informed prioritizations for wildfire mitigation treatments. The ecological values and ecosystem services provided by forests have also typically been secondary considerations. To identify locations across the conterminous US where proactive wildfire management is likely to be effective at reducing wildfire severity and to yield co-benefits for vulnerable communities and ecological values, we developed a set of spatial models that estimated wildfire mitigation potential (based on wildfire hazard and biophysical forest conditions) and either included or excluded information on vulnerable human communities, ecological values and ecosystem services. We then compared areas with high wildfire mitigation potential alone to refined ‘focal areas’ that overlaid social and ecological considerations to quantify the potential benefits of targeted wildfire mitigation treatments. Inclusion of social and ecological considerations substantially increased representation of vulnerable communities and ecological values in focal areas relative to the model that considered wildfire alone. For instance, restoration in these refined focal areas would cover 28% greater imperilled species richness, 45% greater water importance and 26% more families falling below the poverty line. By examining overlap between our refined focal areas and U.S. Forest Service top ranked firesheds (a prominent existing wildfire prioritization scheme), we show that our analysis can help to target wildfire mitigation efforts within firesheds to areas with particularly high social vulnerability and/or ecological value, providing an important compliment to a prioritization scheme based largely on risk to structures. Our results highlight the importance of considering ecological and social factors when implementing wildfire mitigation treatments and provide actionable guidance for integrating these considerations into existing prioritizations.
Core sagebrush areas (CSAs), patches of high sagebrush ecological integrity, continue to decline despite significant conservation and restoration investments across the sagebrush biome. Historically, conservation decisions in the biome have been driven by wildlife species-specific demands, but increasing recognition of the scale of threats and the pace of ecosystem degradation has compelled a shift towards threat-based ecosystem management. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the scale of conservation implementation relative to the rate of degradation or loss from specific threats to the biome to assess whether a conservation deficit exists. To this end, we: 1) quantified and compared the average hectares of conservation practices implemented annually relative to the hectares of CSA loss attributed to each threat; 2) evaluated the relative amount of conservation actions in core sagebrush areas, growth opportunity areas, and other rangeland areas; and 3) assessed how much additional conservation may be needed to stop CSA declines. We then quantified how better spatial targeting and enhanced coordination might reduce the total additional amount of future conservation needed, and evaluated how an influx of resources can close the conservation gap, or the deficit between the conservation needed to offset annual loss and degradation and the capacity for conservation implementation. We found that current rates of conservation (e.g., hectares treated annually) are markedly lower than rates of CSA loss (∼10% of average annual loss). Furthermore, most conservation actions, ∼90% for some treatment types, occurred outside of CSAs likely reducing the efficacy of these conservation actions at retaining and restoring intact sagebrush rangelands. Additionally, we found that conservation efforts will need to increase by more than an order of magnitude (at least 10x) annually to halt CSA declines. However, through better spatial targeting of conservation actions, the increase in conservation needed to stop CSA loss could be reduced by 70% or more. This analysis demonstrates the divergent futures that may await the sagebrush biome pending key decisions regarding conservation targeting, stakeholder cooperation, and the strategic addition of resources.
Conservation efforts for the sagebrush biome in the western United States have been significant, but habitat loss and degradation are currently outpacing collective conservation efforts. The Sagebrush Conservation Design (SCD), cocreated by scientists and managers working across the biome, issues an urgent call to action to radically reprioritize conservation efforts to save the biome. At the heart of SCD is the “defend and grow the core” strategy, which means prioritizing conservation in intact sagebrush areas with native understories and low levels of threats, as opposed to the business-as-usual approach of treating all threats or focusing on areas with the most severe threats. However, SCD applications are limited by the capacity of land managers to integrate maps of rangeland conditions and threats into planning processes for their management area. To increase the integration of spatial data and help managers and planners step down SCD to local-scale conservation planning, we developed a web application that provides a user-friendly interface. Here, we lay out a guide for web application users, which we hope will empower land managers to make strategic conservation decisions that best protect the sagebrush biome.
Wildfires are increasingly impacting social and environmental systems in the United States (US). The ability to mitigate the adverse effects of wildfires increases with understanding of the social, physical, and biological conditions that co-occurred with or caused the wildfire ignitions and contributed to the wildfire impacts. To this end, we developed the FPA FOD-Attributes dataset, which augments the sixth version of the Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA FOD v6) with nearly 270 attributes that coincide with the date and location of each wildfire ignition in the US. FPA FOD v6 contains information on location, jurisdiction, discovery time, cause, and final size of wildfires in the US between 1992 and 2020 . For each wildfire, we added physical (e.g., weather, climate, topography, and infrastructure), biological (e.g., land cover and normalized difference vegetation index), social (e.g., population density and social vulnerability index), and administrative (e.g., national and regional preparedness level and jurisdiction) attributes. This publicly available dataset can be used to answer numerous questions about the covariates associated with human- and lightning-caused wildfires. Furthermore, the FPA FOD-Attributes dataset can support descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive wildfire analytics, including the development of machine learning models. The FPA FOD-Attributes dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8381129 (Pourmohamad et al., 2023).
As relative rates of sea level rise accelerate in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, the frequency of flooding and saltwater intrusion on coastal lands also increases, prompting ecological transformation which can conflict with existing coastal land use such as agriculture. We performed an exploratory study of coastal farmers and woodlot managers in Maryland and Virginia to understand how these producers make land management decisions within the context of sea level rise. Specifically, we used a mixed-methods approach to identify and understand 1) the producer-observed impacts of sea level rise and flooding on coastal lands; 2) the range of actions producers may take in response to sea level rise and flooding; 3) producers' intentions for managing their land in the short- and long-term; 4) producers' motivations for selecting a particular response; and 5) the additional support coastal producers need to successfully adapt to sea level rise. We used the Resist-Accept-Direct framework as an analytical tool to understand how producers’ actions and motivations align with 1) prevention or removal of impacts from flooding and saltwater intrusion, 2) accommodation for wetter or saltier conditions as they naturally occur, or 3) facilitation of specific changes toward a new desired outcome. We found that while most producers in our study plan to resist or accept changes over the next five years, over the longer term a majority of participating producers plan to transition land to a use that is compatible with increased saltwater intrusion and flooding. Most producers in our study would prefer to continue farming yet face a lack of effective and/or affordable management options to resist ecological changes. Flexible mechanisms that support producers in resisting sea level rise impacts in the short term, while supporting them in directing the transition of their land to another productive use in the long term, are needed to support coastal farmers as they adapt to a changing climate.
Wildfires strongly influence forest ecosystem processes, including carbon and nutrient cycling, and vegetation dynamics. As fire activity increases under changing climate conditions, the ecological and biogeochemical resilience of many forest ecosystems remains unknown. To investigate the resilience of forest ecosystems to changing climate and wildfire activity over decades to millennia, we developed a 4800-year high-resolution lake-sediment record from Silver Lake, Montana, USA (47.360° N, 115.566° W). Charcoal particles, pollen grains, element concentrations and stable isotopes of C and N serve as proxies of past changes in fire, vegetation and ecosystem processes such as nitrogen cycling and soil erosion, within a small subalpine forest watershed. A published lake-level history from Silver Lake provides a local record of palaeohydrology. A trend towards increased effective moisture over the late Holocene coincided with a distinct shift in the pollen assemblage c. 1900 yr BP, resulting from increased subalpine conifer abundance. Fire activity, inferred from peaks in macroscopic charcoal, decreased significantly after 1900 yr BP, from one fire event every 126 yr (83–184 yr, 95% CI) from 4800 to 1900 yr BP, to one event every 223 yr (175–280 yr) from 1900 yr BP to present. Across the record, individual fire events were followed by two distinct decadal-scale biogeochemical responses, reflecting differences in ecosystem impacts of fires on watershed processes. These distinct biogeochemical responses were interpreted as reflecting fire severity, highlighting (i) erosion, likely from large or high-severity fires, and (ii) nutrient transfers and enhanced within-lake productivity, likely from lower severity or patchier fires. Biogeochemical and vegetation proxies returned to pre-fire values within decades regardless of the nature of fire effects. Synthesis. Palaeorecords of fire and ecosystem responses provide a novel view revealing past variability in fire effects, analogous to spatial variability in fire severity observed within contemporary wildfires. Overall, the palaeorecord highlights ecosystem resilience to fire across long-term variability in climate and fire activity. Higher fire frequencies in past millennia relative to the 20th and 21st century suggest that northern Rocky Mountain subalpine ecosystems could remain resilient to future increases in fire activity, provided continued ecosystem recovery within decades.
Increased understanding of how mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and wildfire affect subsequent wildfire severity is urgently needed as people and forests face a growing wildfire crisis. In response, we reviewed scientific literature for the US West and completed a meta-analysis that answered three questions: (1) How much do treatments reduce wildfire severity within treated areas? (2) How do the effects vary with treatment type, treatment age, and forest type? (3) How does fire weather moderate the effects of treatments? We found overwhelming evidence that mechanical thinning with prescribed burning, mechanical thinning with pile burning, and prescribed burning only are effective at reducing subsequent wildfire severity, resulting in reductions in severity between 62% and 72% relative to untreated areas. In comparison, thinning only was less effective – underscoring the importance of treating surface fuels when mitigating wildfire severity is the management goal. The efficacy of these treatments did not vary among forest types assessed in this study and was high across a range of fire weather conditions. Prior wildfire had more complex impacts on subsequent wildfire severity, which varied with forest type and initial wildfire severity. Across treatment types, we found that effectiveness of treatments declined over time, with the mean reduction in wildfire severity decreasing more than twofold when wildfire occurred greater than 10 years after initial treatment. Our meta-analysis provides up-to-date information on the extent to which active forest management reduces wildfire severity and facilitates better outcomes for people and forests during future wildfire events.
We assess the relative contributions of land, atmosphere, and oceanic initializations to the forecast skill of root zone soil moisture (SM) utilizing the Community Earth System Model version 2 Sub to Seasonal climate forecast experiments (CESM2-S2S). Using eight sensitivity experiments, we disentangle the individual impacts of these three components and their interactions on the forecast skill for the contiguous United States. The CESM2-S2S experiment, in which land states are initialized while atmosphere and ocean remain in their climatological states, contributes 91 ± 3% of the total sub-seasonal forecast skill across varying soil moisture conditions during summer and winter. Most SM predictability stems from the soil moisture memory effect. Additionally, land-atmosphere coupling contributes 50% of the land-driven soil moisture predictability. A comparative analysis of the CESM2-S2S SM forecast skills against two other climate models highlights the potential for enhancing soil moisture forecast accuracy by improving the representation of soil moisture-precipitation feedback.
Climate change has contributed to unprecedented shifts in ecological patterns and processes. Altered ecological properties may lead to changes in ecosystem structure, function, and composition and impact ecosystem services and relationships among people and natural communities. When compounded by existing stressors and threats such as wildfire, pests, disease, invasive species, and human development, ecological change may become irreversible. Ecological transformation, or the emergence of new ecosystem states that differ from known historical conditions, makes it difficult for land stewards and partners to delineate management goals and adhere to current management strategies. Growing concern and recognition that traditional or familiar stewardship strategies may no longer support resilient ecological communities has driven land stewards and their partners to seek alternative solutions to address complex problems under climate change.
User guide to highlight how to generate and extract quantitative climate scenario information from ClimateToolbox.org for Scenario Planning and Impact Assessment. This guide will showcase how the tools on ClimateToolbox.org can help identify divergent climate future scenarios relevant to a region and resource management and extract quantitative climate summaries and spatial and time series data for applications related to climate change vulnerability assessments and scenario planning. More specifically guidance is provided on: Future Climate Scatter tool - for scenario selection; Future Climate Scenarios tool - for generating climate change summaries and spatial data for selected scenarios; and Future Time Series tool - for generating time series of different climate variables for a selected climate scenario.