Role of Fire and Fuels in Ecological Restoration

In recently completed research in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service Northern Research Station, we have shown how attempts to reduce fuel loads using salvage logging after a major disturbance event in a northern forest landscape can lead to variable influences on future fire severity and carbon pools. We are also engaged in a new project with the Bureau of Land Management to look at the role of fire, non-native annual species, and restoration treatments in influencing fuel loads in sagebrush communities in the Great Basin. This project will use a combination of experimental fuels reduction and restoration treatments, landscape-scale sampling fuel loads, and remotely sensed imagery to develop spatially explicit models of dynamic fuel loads across successional and invasion gradients.