Since the 1990s the U.S. and especially the Western U.S. have experienced more intense and costly fires. To help address this problem government agencies are increasingly looking at homeowners in fire-prone landscapes to mitigate fire risk. Part of this effort involves communicating risk and understanding how residents perceive risk. This...
Contemporary fire effects are raising concerns about the resistance and resilience of dry mixed-conifer forests to large wildfires. Fire refugia – unburned or low-severity patches within fire perimeters – are understudied components of post-fire mosaics that may be key drivers of forest recovery following high-severity fire. Little is known about...
The increasing human demands on natural resources, in combination with uncertainties about ecosystem dynamics due to global change, has led the scientific community to conclude that new approaches in understanding of ecological systems are needed to tackle environmental issues in an efficient manner. One development that has received more attention...
Policy regarding the management of public forests has undergone a drastic shift over the past couple of decades due to the loss old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States. For much of the 20th century, forest management on public lands emphasized timber production through the use...
Fire is the dominant disturbance process in western U.S. forests, and although effects of fire in upland forests are relatively well-studied, there is little information about fire effects on riparian forests, critical areas of the landscape for both habitat and water quality. This dissertation examines different aspects of fire effects...
Coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var menziesii) forests are extensive west of the crest of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington and are renowned for their productivity, biodiversity, and the ecosystem services they provide. Increasing wildfire activity in recent years including the extensive 2020 Labor Day fires, and a warming...
This investigation on fire mosaics addressed several aspects:
(1) quantifying the role of terrain variables in fire-related
mortality and historical mean fire return interval (MFRI), (2)
comparing post-burn Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery, TM
difference imagery, and aerial photo interpretation to map forest
survival after wildfire, and (3) to describe...
My objectives were to: 1) develop a point count technique for estimating relative
abundance of band-tailed pigeons (Columbafasciata monilis), 2) determine the
availability, distribution, and interspersion of mineral sites, and nesting and foraging cover in relation to abundance of band-tailed pigeons in west-central Oregon, and 3) test the hypothesis that...
This paper presents a framework for analyzing efficient spatial allocation of forest
management efforts - fuel treatment and harvest - under the risk of fire. The framework
integrates a fire behavior model and a spatially-explicit stochastic dynamic optimization
model. I investigate the effects of spatial interaction across plots during forest...
Fire regimes across the western United States have been altered due to past land management and changing land use. Mitigating increased risks of wildfire occurrence in landscapes such as central Oregon requires landscape level management from both governmental and private organizations. Non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners manage a relatively small...