Keynote: Managing for Forest Resilience Under Global Change: the Power of Fire Refugia

Presenter Information

Crystal Kolden

Location

USU Eccles Conference Center

Event Website

https://www.restoringthewest.org/

Streaming Media

Abstract

Wildfires and bark beetles and drought…oh my! Forest resilience is a top concern for managers tasked with maintaining it both in the US and globally in an era of rapid global change. Fire refugia are islands within fire perimeters that are either unburned or only minimally burned so as to maintain key ecosystem functions. They are critical landscape elements by which ecosystems can maintain biodiversity and resilience to disturbances. As climate change alters fire regimes and increases the frequency of so-called megafires, however, there is little understanding of what the impacts may be on fire refugia and their stationarity over time. This knowledge gap persists, in part, because fire refugia have been largely understudied across large spatial extents at the landscape-scale. Recent findings demonstrate that fire refugia have not declined as a proportion of area burned across the Inland Northwestern US, and initially do not appear to be well-correlated to top-down climatic controls. This would suggest that fire refugia are facilitated by bottom-up factors such as topography, vegetation, and human engineering of the landscape. For land managers who are tasked with preserving key sites or conserving specific ecosystem functions and services, undertaking to support fire refugia may be one of the avenues to develop and maintain forest resilience. Translating this understanding to management strategies, however, will require focused research in this arena to develop comparative crosswalks between analyses focused on species versus those focused on landscape pattern.

Comments

Dr. Crystal Kolden is a Pyrogeographer who studies fire at the socio-ecological nexus across the globe. She started her career as a wildland firefighter with the US Forest Service, and was later an ecologist with USFS and USGS. She is an associate professor in the Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences department in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, where she runs the Pyrogeography Lab and tries to understand how we humans can better live with fire. She and her husband and their twin boys live in northern Idaho, where they enjoy good fishing, good food, and no traffic.

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Oct 17th, 8:40 AM Oct 17th, 9:20 AM

Keynote: Managing for Forest Resilience Under Global Change: the Power of Fire Refugia

USU Eccles Conference Center

Wildfires and bark beetles and drought…oh my! Forest resilience is a top concern for managers tasked with maintaining it both in the US and globally in an era of rapid global change. Fire refugia are islands within fire perimeters that are either unburned or only minimally burned so as to maintain key ecosystem functions. They are critical landscape elements by which ecosystems can maintain biodiversity and resilience to disturbances. As climate change alters fire regimes and increases the frequency of so-called megafires, however, there is little understanding of what the impacts may be on fire refugia and their stationarity over time. This knowledge gap persists, in part, because fire refugia have been largely understudied across large spatial extents at the landscape-scale. Recent findings demonstrate that fire refugia have not declined as a proportion of area burned across the Inland Northwestern US, and initially do not appear to be well-correlated to top-down climatic controls. This would suggest that fire refugia are facilitated by bottom-up factors such as topography, vegetation, and human engineering of the landscape. For land managers who are tasked with preserving key sites or conserving specific ecosystem functions and services, undertaking to support fire refugia may be one of the avenues to develop and maintain forest resilience. Translating this understanding to management strategies, however, will require focused research in this arena to develop comparative crosswalks between analyses focused on species versus those focused on landscape pattern.

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/rtw/2017/Oct17/1