When: Tuesday, May 21, 2019 – 11:00am
Where:
Cost: Free
Mixed severity fire regime systems may be the most widely distributed and yet poorly understood fire regime type in western North America. This incongruity results from the diversity of forest types and fire regime attributes that are encompassed by the mixed-severity fire regime concept, combined with significant methodological challenges to their study that have resulted in persistent information gaps.
In this webinar, Dr. Cameron Naficy will present findings from a synthesis of multiple projects conducted in 3 unique mixed-severity ecosystems from the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. and Canada, including: low elevation pure Douglas-fir forests of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Gallatin National Forest, Montana, U.S.), dry and moist mixed-conifer forests of the Glacier/Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (Flathead National Forest, Montana, U.S.), and prairie ecotone lodgepole pine-aspen forests of the southwestern Alberta Foothills (Province of Alberta, Canada). He will briefly review a new reconstruction method his research group developed that combines extensive dendroecological plot networks and detailed forest structure mapping from high-resolution historical aerial imagery. The method provides improved spatio-temporal inferences about the historical fire regime and the resulting vegetation conditions over large landscapes. Using these data, he will describe the spatial and temporal patterns of fire frequency and severity for each study ecosystem, the fire-mediated stand dynamics and vegetation conditions that characterized each ecosystem, and some novel resilience mechanisms and ecological surprises associated with the mixed-severity fire regime model. This project demonstrates how historical data can be used to move beyond simple summaries of historical fire regime attributes and landscape condition (e.g. mean fire frequency, historical range of variability of structural conditions) by using historical data to reveal fundamental fire regime processes, drivers, and ecological outcomes.
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This is part of a series of Healthy Landscapes Program webinars. Find the full archive of presentations here.
