open access Archives - Page 3 of 5

Wildfire briefing, November 4, 2013

Bill GabbertNovember 4, 2013August 25, 2019UncategorizedAustralia, California, open access, research, Rim Fire1 Comment

After the Rim Fire, water now worries land managers

The 257,000-acre Rim Fire is now 100 percent contained, at a cost of $127 million, but the effects of rain on barren slopes is the newest worry for land mangers. Over 90 percent of the fire burned in the Tuolumne River watershed in and near Yosemite National Park in California. The loss of vegetation and exposure of the soil could lead to erosion and increased water runoff that may lead to flooding, increased sediment, and debris flows.

The Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team has been working in the Rim Fire area for weeks and continues to assess the needs and implement emergency stabilization measures. Projects the team is working on include:

Improving road drainage and storm-proofing roads at risk of failure from increased flooding.
Stabilizing and repairing trails.
Monitoring for and treating invasive weeds.
Mulching and chipping to protect fragile soils.

Two dry years in a row have worried land managers but now the thought of a heavy rain has them concerned.

Acid frogs are not greatly affected by fires

Often we hear of people who suffer mental anguish over the plight of animals being affected by wildfire — they assume that Bambi and others die by the thousands. But most creatures have adapted to fire over tens of thousands of years.

Recent research in Australia concluded that acid frog “populations did not suffer adversely from moderate intensity fires as suitable refuges, including standing water, were available. All species were present shortly after fire with subsequent successful reproduction occurring once wetlands were sufficiently inundated.”

You can obtain a copy of the taxpayer-funded research by paying the International Journal of Wildland Fire, published by CSIRO, $25. The researchers work for Griffith University, which apparently does not believe in the concept of Open Access to taxpayer-funded research.

New Hampshire may ban fire balloons

New Hampshire may become the 26th state to ban fire balloons, which are sometimes called sky lanterns or Chinese lanterns.

These incendiary devices use burning material such as rubbing alcohol or a candle to heat the air in a bag made of tissue paper or very thin plastic. The heat makes the device lighter than air causing it to rise into the sky, staying aloft for 10 minutes to 2 hours. They can be very pretty to watch especially when they are released dozens or hundreds at a time such as at a wedding or some other celebration. The problem is they are uncontrollable and sometimes start wildfires or structure fires.

The National Association of State Fire Marshals adopted a resolution this year urging states to ban the sale and use of the devices. Below is an excerpt from their position on the issue:

…Therefore, be it resolved that the National Association of State Fire Marshals strongly encourages states to ban the sale and use of sky lanterns through whichever means is most expedient for them. Banning the use of sky lanterns is important to help control homemade devices as well as those purchased from various sources.

New Hampshire state Senator Nancy Stiles has introduced a bill to prohibit them in her state. Below is an excerpt from USA Today:

Stiles, a Republican, filed her bill at the request of Rye Fire Chief Skip Sullivan. Sullivan said people have lit the lanterns at the beach thinking they would float out to sea only to have them blow inland. One landed in a selectman’s yard but burned out and did no damage, he said.

Sullivan said fire officials want a law “primarily for the fact that when you light these and send them off, it is an open fire you’re sending off.”

He added, “When these things come down, are these people going to clean up the mess they leave behind?”

Research: climate change may reduce conifer regeneration after wildfire

Bill GabbertOctober 14, 2013August 25, 2019Uncategorizedclimate change, open access, Oregon, regeneration, research3 Comments

regeneration after wildfire — A decade after a stand-replacement forest fire on the Metolius watershed in Central Oregon, almost no trees have begun to regenerate on one of the dry sites at lower elevation. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University)

Government employees working for Oregon State University have determined that predicted increases in temperature and drought in the coming century may make it more difficult for conifers such as ponderosa pine to regenerate after major forest fires on dry, low-elevation sites, in some cases leading to conversion of forests to grass or shrub lands, a report suggests.

But even though you paid for it already by funding the research as a taxpayer, it will cost you $35.95 to purchase a copy of their findings, written by Erich Kyle Dodson and Heather Taylor Root of the University’s Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society in Corvallis, Oregon. The for-profit Elsevier corporation headquartered in the Netherlands published the paper. Wildfire Today supports open access to the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research. (UPDATE April 4, 2018: the research is now available for no additional charge.)

Dodson and Root concluded that moisture stress is a key limitation for conifer regeneration following stand-replacing wildfire, which will likely increase with climate change. This will make post-fire recovery on dry sites slow and uncertain. If forests are desired in these locations, more aggressive attempts at reforestation may be needed, they said.

The study, published in Forest Ecology and Management, was done in a portion of the Metolius River watershed in the eastern Cascade Range of Oregon, which prior to a 2002 fire was mostly ponderosa pine with some Douglas-fir and other tree species. The research area was not salvage-logged or replanted following the severe, stand-replacing fire.

“A decade after this fire, there was almost no tree regeneration at lower, drier sites,” said Erich Dodson, a researcher with the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “There was some regeneration at higher sites with more moisture. But at the low elevations, it will be a long time before a forest comes back, if it ever does.”

Similar situations may be found in many areas of the American West in coming decades, the researchers say, and recruitment of new forests may be delayed or prevented – even in climate conditions that might have been able to maintain an existing forest. While mature trees can use their roots to tap water deeper in the soil, competition with dense understory vegetation can make it difficult for seedlings to survive.

Openings in ponderosa pine forests created by wildfire have persisted for more than a century on harsh, south-facing slopes in Colorado, the researchers noted in their report. And fire severity is already increasing in many forests due to climate change – what is now thought of as a drought in some locations may be considered average by the end of the next century.

If trees do fail to regenerate, it could further reduce ecosystem carbon storage and amplify the greenhouse effect, the study said.

Restoration treatment including thinning and prescribed burning may help reduce fire severity and increase tree survival after wildfire, as well as provide a seed source for future trees, Dodson said. These dry sites with less resilience to stand-replacing fire should be priorities for treatment, if maintaining a forest is a management objective, the study concluded.

Higher-elevation, mixed conifer forests in less moisture-limited sites may be able to recover from stand-replacing wildfire without treatment, the researchers said.

Transferring fire research results — to middle schools

Bill GabbertApril 14, 2013April 14, 2013Uncategorizedopen access, research4 Comments

State and federal governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars on research every year. If the knowledge gained through those efforts is kept locked away in for-profit journals or not made freely and easily available to the public, a person could argue — what is the point of paying for the research?

One avenue the U.S. Forest Service is using to transfer research results is through the “Natural Inquirer”, created so that scientists can share their research with middle school students. Each article on the site introduces scientific research conducted by Forest Service scientists.

Here is an excerpt from the web site:

…All of the research in this journal is concerned with nature, trees, wildlife, insects, outdoor activities and water. First students will “meet the scientists” who conduct the research. Then students read special information about science, and then about the environment. Students will also read about a specific research project, written in a way that scientists write when publishing their research in journals. Students become scientists when they do the Discovery FACTivity, learning vocabulary words that help in understanding articles.

This seems like a great idea, and deals with at least two issues. That of transferring research results, and helping to increase and improve the science programs in schools. It may also allow students to identify with scientists by linking research with individual employees in the USFS. Who knows, it might even encourage a middle school student to consider science as a profession.

Wildland fire is included as one of the many topics covered at the site, as you can see if you search for “fire” on their search page.

The Natural Inquirer has published a series of “Scientists’ Cards”. Below are the front and back of the card for Dr. Pepe Iniguez, a landscape fire ecologist:

Federal government moves toward open access to scientific research

Bill GabbertFebruary 22, 2013September 13, 2019Uncategorizedlegislation, open access, research2 Comments

Open Access logo

The United States government is taking steps leading toward open access to the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research. Too often researchers pay privately owned scientific journals “page charges” to publish their findings, which then are sold back to taxpayers in the form of subscriptions which cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year or more than $30 to read one paper if you don’t have a subscription.

At least partially in response to an on-line petition at the White House web site which received over 65,000 signatures (including mine), the administration issued a memorandum today that increases access to research. It helps, but is not an ideal solution. The new procedures require agencies that spend more than $100 million annually on research to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. While that is better than keeping it secret or making taxpayers pay twice for the data, 12 months is too long. It should be much shorter, say, 3 or 6 months after appearing in a journal. In addition, ALL research should be available to the public, not just research funded by agencies that spend more than $100 million on R&D.

For the last three years Congress has dithered about the issue, doing little until last week when a bill was introduced, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, which would force the public release of journal articles within six months of publication. It also only applies to agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on R&D.

The for-profit Elsevier corporation headquartered in the Netherlands has published papers on wildland fire research written by government employees, and vehemently opposes the bill, according to an article in the Washington Post. In fact, in 2011 Elsevier backed a bill that would quash open access to scientific articles. The bill died after it encountered serious opposition.

At Wildfire Today we have ranted about this for the last couple of years (tag: open access), and it’s heart-warming to see some progress is being made.

Bark beetles and wildland fire behavior – a summary of research

Bill GabbertJune 1, 2012November 21, 2018Uncategorizedbeetles, open access, research1 Comment

There are at least 39 published studies about the effects of bark beetles on wildland fire behavior. With such a bounty of government-funded work, you could hope that we would have some definitive answers, but unfortunately, while there is some agreement among the studies, there is substantial disagreement on some key issues, including the impacts of beetle-caused tree mortality in key areas such as fire behavior during the red needle phase, which is typically one to four years after a beetle attack.

This was one of the conclusions in a recent study that analyzed 39 other published works about the effects of pine beetle mortality. It is titled Effects of bark beetle-caused tree mortality on wildfire, and was written by Jeffrey A. Hicke, Morris C. Johnson, Jane L. Hayes, and Haiganoush K. Preisler.

The chart below is from their paper.

The author’s confidence in the conclusions reached about torching potential and active crown fire potential for the first ten years was low, but it is probable that active crown potential would increase for the first four years after mortality and then decrease dramatically. Torching potential would probably increase.

Surface fire properties, defined as reaction intensity, rate of spread, and flame length, would likely increase, but the confidence in the prediction for the first four years was low.

The authors pointed out that changes in fire behavior following a pine beetle outbreak…

…may only occur under some environmental conditions. For example, effects may be manifested during intermediate wind speeds (Simard et al., 2011) or in moister conditions, such as earlier in the fire season (Steele and Copple, 2009). Past controversy on this topic can be partly reconciled by this consideration of more specificity about study question, time since outbreak, and fuels or fire characteristic when describing results.

Our view of the research

It would be helpful if all of these parameters and studies could distill the conclusions into one index, which I will call Resistance To Control (RTC). Simultaneous increases in surface fire, torching, and crowning would result in more RTC. But it becomes more complicated to characterize when, for instance, crown fire potential decreases to near zero, while surface fire intensity and torching increase. Long distance spotting is a firefighter’s biggest headache and makes fires almost impossible to control, at least at the head. Crown fires are the major culprit for long distance spotting, but surface fires and individual or multiple tree torching can also create spot fires. And all of this varies, of course, with the weather. Strong winds can make ANY fire very resistant to control as long as the fuels are continuous.

If a person leaps to the possibly incorrect conclusion that all of the fire behavior parameters shown in the chart above are accurate, including the sections with low confidence, then RTC would increase one to four years after a beetle outbreak, and then would probably decrease since the crown fire potential would dramatically decline. Surface fires, including those with some torching, can be more easily controlled using tactics, sometimes with aerial support, such as direct hand line construction, hose lays, indirect line construction with burnouts, and backfiring from out ahead of the fire. When crowning is the primary method of fire spread, you usually have to wait for either the weather or the fuels to change. Air tankers and helicopters dropping fire retardant or water can be more effective when the fire is confined to the surface, as long as firefighters are on the ground to take advantage of the temporary slowing of the rate of spread, and if the wind is not too strong.

With apologies to the authors of this very good research paper, I took the liberty of adding a Resistance To Control variable to their chart:

And of course the authors of the paper included the familiar phrase, “more research is needed”, which is a mandatory section in every research paper.

The authors, who are employed by taxpayers, arranged to have the government pay a fee to have their paper published by the for-profit Elsevier corporation which is headquartered in the Netherlands. But thankfully, this time the USFS also published it on their U.S. Government web site where taxpayers can access it at no additional charge.

If you believe taxpayer-funded research should always be available to taxpayers freely over the internet, go to the White House web site and sign the petition. (Update Jan. 23, 2013: you can still read the petition at the site, but it is closed to new signers.)

Thanks go out to Tom, who, in a comment on another article on Wildfire Today about bark beetles, pointed out this new research paper.

More research surfaces about pine beetles and fire

Bill GabbertFebruary 15, 2012August 25, 2019Uncategorizedbeetles, open access, research8 Comments

Crown fire experiment 2004 — International Crown fire experiment in healthy, not beetle-killed trees. Photo U.S. Forest Service

UPDATE at 2:11 p.m. MT, Feb. 16, 2012:

We contacted Nan Christianson, the Assistant Station Director – Communications at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and asked where they stood on Open Access, and why the study, below, was only available to taxpayers if they paid $31.50 to a private company. Within a few hours they added it to a U.S. Forest Service web site, TreeSearch, where it is available at no charge. It is still listed at the private company for $31.50. We are waiting for more detailed information from the USFS concerning their policy on the Open Access of taxpayer-funded research.

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February 15, 2012

At Wildfire Today we have previously written about mountain pine beetle research that used satellite data and computer models to extrapolate findings to fire behavior characteristics. Now there is a new study that measured foliar chemistry, moisture, and flammability in the lab and also draws a conclusion about fire behavior out in the real world.

The latter study, which is published behind a pay wall in the April, 2012 edition of Elsevier’s Forest Ecology and Management, was written by Matt Jolly and others at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. In their study, foliar samples were taken periodically from multiple trees identified as green, recently attacked by mountain pine beetles, and red (dead). The fuel moisture content, chemical composition, and time to ignition of needles from each attack category were quantified. They found that in the lab, decreased moisture content and changes in foliar chemistry increased the flammability of beetle-attacked foliage, and red needles ignited much more quickly than green needles. They further extrapolated that “crown fire potential may be higher in attacked stands as long as foliage is retained on the tree”.

You can read the study, which American taxpayers paid for already, but you will have to pay the for-profit Elsevier corporation $31.50. This is not Open Access, which we have written about before. (The U.S. Forest Service should publish the results of all of their research immediately upon completion at no additional cost to American taxpayers. What is the point of the USFS funding research if the results are kept a virtual secret?)

In an earlier study, University of Wisconsin forest ecologists Monica Turner and Phil Townsend, in collaboration with Yellowstone National Park Vegetation Management Specialist Roy Renkin, examined the beetle and fire connection in the forests near Yellowstone National Park.

Using satellite data they studied burn patterns and fire occurrence data and the relationships to mountain pine beetle attacks.

Here is an excerpt from the NASA article:

Their preliminary analysis indicates that large fires do not appear to occur more often or with greater severity in forest tracts with beetle damage. In fact, in some cases, beetle-killed forest swaths may actually be less likely to burn. What they’re discovering is in line with previous research on the subject.

The results may seem at first counterintuitive, but make sense when considered more carefully. First, while green needles on trees appear to be more lush and harder to burn, they contain high levels of very flammable volatile oils. When the needles die, those flammable oils begin to break down. As a result, depending on the weather conditions, dead needles may not be more likely to catch and sustain a fire than live needles.

Second, when beetles kill a lodgepole pine tree, the needles begin to fall off and decompose on the forest floor relatively quickly. In a sense, the beetles are thinning the forest, and the naked trees left behind are essentially akin to large fire logs. However, just as you can’t start a fire in a fireplace with just large logs and no kindling, wildfires are less likely to ignite and carry in a forest of dead tree trunks and low needle litter.

A third study published in 2011 used computer models to predict fire behavior and how it was affected by beetle attacks. It was titled “Do mountain pine beetle outbreaks change the probability of active crown fire in lodgepole pine forests?” Here is an excerpt from the abstract:

Modeling results suggested that undisturbed, red, and gray-stage stands were unlikely to exhibit transition of surface ﬁres to tree crowns (torching), and that the likelihood of sustaining an active crown ﬁre (crowning) decreased from undisturbed to gray-stage stands. Simulated ﬁre behavior was little affected by beetle disturbance when wind speed was either below 40 km/h or above 60 km/h, but at intermediate wind speeds, probability of crowning in red- and gray-stage stands was lower than in undisturbed stands, and old post-outbreak stands were predicted to have passive crown ﬁres. Results were consistent across a range of fuel moisture scenarios. Our results suggest that mountain pine beetle outbreaks in Greater Yellowstone may reduce the probability of active crown ﬁre in the short term by thinning lodgepole pine canopies.

The paper was written by Martin Simard, William H. Romme, Jacob M. Griffin, and Monica G. Turner. A summary of their findings is HERE.

All three of these studies, while they collected some static data from the field, were executed in laboratories, and not from observed fire behavior in the real world.

So which school of thought do you subscribe to? Do you go with the most intuitive-friendly one and think lower foliar moisture content leads to more crown fires in beetle-kill areas, or do you buy into the satellite burn data and the computer model data which lean toward more resistance to crown fires in areas affected by beetles?

It may take another International Crown Fire Experiment (see photo above), like was done in Canada between 1995 and 2001, setting actual fires in healthy and beetle-affected stands, to resolve the question.

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