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Project ID: 06-2-1-59

Year: 2006

Date Started: 07/28/2006

Date Completed: 10/02/2009

Title: Fire and Fuel Management in Coast Redwood

Project Proposal Abstract: Fire and fuels management in California's coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests is limited by our poor understanding of reference conditions. In other forest types, knowledge of historic fire regimes, forest structure, composition and fuels has empowered managers by providing them with evidence of change caused by past management. For some land allocations, reference conditions provide a range of structural, compositional or disturbance objectives to manage toward. Evidence of long-term change is especially important in forest ecosystems where trees can live for over a millennium, as is the case with coast redwood. Despite the importance of reference conditions for modern forest management, the science surrounding reference conditions in coast redwood is controversial and managers have as many questions as answers about the processes needed to sustain their forests. Markedly different methods have been used to interpret fire history and strong local and regional environmental gradients preclude simple generalizations across the forest type. The frequent fires reported from the southern and dryer part of the redwood zone may not be representative of the wetter northern portion of the coast redwood range, where the most spectacular forests occur. Moreover, due to the paucity of lightning ignitions in the northern coast redwood zone, historical fire regimes may have been largely an artifact of anthropogenic ignitions. If so, this coast redwood vegetation type may not require fire to persist in an acceptable state. This possible ignition-dependence of fires in portions of the coast redwood range raises management and public concerns about the ecological relevance of historical fire regimes. Recent wildfires in old and second growth coast redwood have demonstrated that a more sound understanding of historical reference conditions is urgent. This proposal will support reconstructions of fire history in a portion of the coast redwood range where managers need it the most. It will integrate this research and other existing data to develop a GIS-based reference conditions model that provides information at a scale needed for local decision making.

Principal Investigator: Steve Norman

Agency/Organization: Forest Service

Branch or Dept: SRS-Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Ctr

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Co-Principal Investigator	Leonel Arguello	NPS-National Park Service	Redwood National and State Parks
Co-Principal Investigator	Stephen Underwood	California	State Parks-North Coast Redwoods District
Co-Principal Investigator	Morgan J. Varner III	Mississippi State University	Department of Forestry
Federal Cooperator	Bill Pierce	NPS-National Park Service	Redwoods National and State Parks

Project Locations

Consortium

California

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.")

	ID	Type	Title
	8363	Refereed Publication	Presettlement and Modern Disturbance Regimes in Coast Redwood Forests: Implications for the Conservation of Old-Growth Stands
	8362	MS Thesis	Structure of Downed Woody and Vegetative Detritus in Old-Growth Sequoia sempervirens Forests (B. Graham)
	8364	Conference/Symposia/Workshop	Fire and Fuels Management in Coast Redwoods
	8367	Photo	Fire Scars from a Coast Redwood Tree Killed by the Canoe Fire in Humboldt Redwoods State Park
	8366	Photo	Alluvial Flat of Montgomery Woods State Nature Reserve

Supporting Documents

There are no supporting documents available for this project.

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