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Project ID: 07-1-2-10

Year: 2007

Date Started: 07/01/2007

Date Completed: 11/15/2012

Title: Age-Class Mosaics and Wind-Driven Fire: Further Fuel for the Debate

Project Proposal Abstract: Recently revised southern California national forest management plans identify virtually every acre as the wildland-urban interface (WUI) environment, because any fire start could burn into human development within one burning period. Continuing debate about the role of chaparral age class mosaics in modifying fire size and behavior under wind-driven conditions confounds managers' ability to implement prescribed burns in remote areas to protect WUI - opponents fear that inevitable large fires will reburn young fuels, leading to chaparral regeneration failure and type-conversion to weedy grassland. The Santa Ana wind-driven Esperanza fire (2006) burned through the North Mountain Experimental Area (NMEA) and vicinity, including 10 previous fires. Multiple images of the fire's progression were taken using Riverside Fire Lab's airborne FireMapper thermal-imaging system. Existing fuels data and historic NMEA maps plus new fire images provide a unique opportunity to investigate relationships between vegetation history and fire behavior and severity. We will coordinate with an existing JFSP shrub fuels project (03-1-3-06) as well as generate our own estimates of fuel consumption and fire behavior to ground-truth temperature data from FireMapper. Soil samples collected in a stratified random manner will be used to assess seed bank survival, evaluating the utility of FireMapper images for severity mapping. Coordinated documentation of vegetation recovery will address the effects of age class and fire behavior on chaparral regeneration and nonnative species invasion. This project will extend lessons learned from 2003 large fires (JFSP 04-1-2-01) to address the chaparral mosaic debate and will enhance utility of an existing tool, FireMapper.

Principal Investigator: Jan L. Beyers

Agency/Organization: Forest Service

Branch or Dept: PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Co-Principal Investigator	Marcia G. Narog	Forest Service	PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside
Co-Principal Investigator	Timothy Paysen	Forest Service	PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside
Co-Principal Investigator	Philip J. Riggan	Forest Service	PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside
Co-Principal Investigator	David R. Weise	Forest Service	PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside
Federal Cooperator	Jan L. Beyers	Forest Service	PSW-Forest Fire Lab-Riverside
Federal Fiscal Representative	Jackie Rountree	Forest Service	PSW-Pacific Southwest Research Station

Project Locations

Consortium

California

California

Level	State	Agency	Unit
STATE	CA	FS	San Bernardino National Forest
STATE	CA	BLM	Palm Springs South Coast Field Office
STATE	CA	FED	Other Federal Lands

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
	9080	NonRefereed Publication	Remote Sensing Fire and Fuels in Southern California
	10192	NonRefereed Publication	Remote Sensing Fire and Fuels in Southern California
	7617	NonRefereed Publication	Correlation Between Remotely Sensed Fire Intensity and Fuel Consumption in California Chaparral--A Case Study
	7616	Poster	Fire Severity and Vegetation Age Class Effects on Post-fire Chaparral Seed Banks

Supporting Documents

There are no supporting documents available for this project.

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