Advanced Search Results Detail

Project ID: 04-2-1-115

Year: 2004

Date Started: 07/23/2004

Date Completed: 08/01/2008

Title: Historical Fire Regimes of the Willamette Valley, Oregon: Providing a Long-Term, Regional Context for Fire and Fuels Management

Project Proposal Abstract: In the Willamette Valley and fringe lands, populations will double in the next few decades and expand into areas that historically supported oak woodlands, savannas and prairies, and dry Douglas-fir and grand fir forests. An analysis of past and present fire regimes within the largely wildland/urban interface is underway, with current efforts focusing on tree-ring studies of Valley fringe forests. The proposed project will develop a transect of 2000-yr-long fire records based on lake- and wetland-sediment records in the Willamette Valley on BLM, state and private land, where dendrochronological records do not exist. Knowledge of historical and current fires regimes will provide information on the range of stand composition, structure, general fuel characterisitics and landscape pattern, required to implement National Fire Plan goals and objectives. Changes in fire regimes through time help us assess hazardous fuels, forest health, and sustainability issues; prioritize projects; and determine appropriate types and timing of treatments for restoration and hazardous fuels reduction. Our first objective is to reconstruct regional variation in historical fire regimes based on sediment and tree-ring data collected from the eastern foothills of the Coast Range, the Willamette Valley, and the foothills of the western Cascade Range for the last 2000 years in an effort to understand the synergistic effects of land-use and climate change. Our second objective is to reconstruct historical vegetation changes, including major shifts in plant community composition and structure arising from changes in climate and fire regimes. Our third objective is to communicate our findings to land managers and researchers through oral presentations, written reports and peer-reviewed publications.

Principal Investigator: Cathy Whitlock

Agency/Organization: Montana State University

Branch or Dept: Department of Earth Sciences

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Federal Cooperator	James Saveland	Forest Service	RMRS-Natural Resources Research Center

Project Locations

Consortium

Northwest

There are no project locations identified for this project.

Project Deliverables

Final Report ("Results presented in JFSP Final Reports may not have been peer-reviewed and should be interpreted as tentative until published in a peer-reviewed source.")

There are no deliverables available for this project.

Supporting Documents

The following supporting documents are available for this project.

Brief

Convert PDF documents to an html document using Adobe's online conversion tool.