The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love—dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy.
The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love—dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy.
The research, led by the University of Utah, University of California, Berkeley, and the United States Forest Service, is the first to identify how extreme weather conditions and forest management practices jointly impact fire severity. Leveraging a unique lidar dataset, the authors created three-dimensional maps of public and private forests before five wildfires burned 1.1 million acres in the northern Sierra Nevada, California.
In periods of extreme weather, stem density—the number of trees per acre—became the most important predictor of a high-severity fire. Even in the face of accelerating climate change, how we manage the land will make a difference.
Read more at: University of Utah
11 years after the 2007 Moonlight Fire. (Left) A patch of forest that experienced high-intensity fire. The mature trees are charred from root to tip. (right) A patch of forest that experienced low-severity fire. The char-marks up the base of the truck indicate the flames didn’t make it to the crown of the tree. In the high-severity patch, shrubs have taken over, preventing the forest from regenerating. (Photo Credit: Jacob Levine)
