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Project ID: 07-1-1-01

Year: 2007

Date Started: 06/01/2007

Date Completed: 05/31/2012

Title: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Wood Shreds on Post-Fire Erosion

Project Proposal Abstract: The increased size and severity of wildland fires require increasingly effective BAER treatments. A commonly used BAER treatment is mulching, the spreading of agricultural straw by hand or from the air using a helicopter. While widely used and fairly reasonably effective at reducing runoff and erosion, agricultural straw is not a product native to the forest and often carries invasive weeds. There is a growing consensus among Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams that a mulch product native to the forest would be preferable to agricultural straw. Wood shreds, developed by the Missoula Technology & Development Center, are one such product. Made from post-fire slash and small diameter trees, wood shreds have shown promise in reducing erosion in laboratory tests and on road obliteration projects. Slopes and flow path lengths on BAER treated hillsides typically are both steeper and longer than in the demonstrated road obliteration projects, raising questions on the shreds? effectiveness under the harsher post-fire conditions. The authors propose to develop an optimum blend of wood shreds, specifically tailored to post-fire conditions, and to test their erosion reduction potential at the hillslope scale. This proposal is in response to Joint Fire AFP 2007-1-1 Task 1: "Evaluating the effects, effectiveness, and costs of post-fire restoration and/or rehabilitation methods, processes and tools." The optimum length and width specification for post-fire wood shreds will be determined through rainfall simulation on a fine-grained burned forest soil. Following the determination of the optimum dimensions, the erosion reduction ability of the optimized wood shreds will be field-tested at the hillslope scale using concentrated flow simulation techniques and sediment fences installed on a severely burned hillside. Erosion monitoring will be conducted for a period of two years after the fire. This proposal, if funded, will continue to add to the growing body of knowledge concerning effectiveness of post-fire rehabilitation treatments developed by the authors and others. Results from this study will be disseminated through publications in peer-reviewed journals and a General Technical Report on the use of wood shreds in the post-fire environment. The authors are often called upon to make presentations at regional specialists meetings, thus affording an opportunity for the study results to be directly conveyed to BAER team specialists.

Principal Investigator: Peter R. Robichaud

Agency/Organization: Forest Service

Branch or Dept: RMRS-Forestry Sciences Lab-Moscow

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Co-Principal Investigator	Randy B. Foltz	Forest Service	RMRS-Forestry Sciences Lab-Moscow
Co-Principal Investigator	Charlie Showers	Forest Service	Missoula Technology & Development Center
Federal Cooperator	James Saveland	Forest Service	RMRS-Natural Resources Research Center
Federal Fiscal Representative	Judy A. Perry	Forest Service	RMRS-Forestry Sciences Lab-Fort Collins

Project Locations

Consortium

Alaska

Appalachian

California

Great Basin

Great Plains

Lake States

Oak Woodlands

Northern Rockies

Northwest

Pacific

South

Southern Rockies

Southwest

Tallgrass

Level	State	Agency	Unit
NATIONAL		MULTIPLE
REGIONAL	Interior West	MULTIPLE
REGIONAL	Pacific Coast States	MULTIPLE
NATIONAL		MULTIPLE

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
	8893	Refereed Publication	Evaluating the Efficacy of Wood Shreds for Mitigating Erosion
	8894	Refereed Publication	An Evaluation of Three Wood Shred Blends for Post-Fire Erosion Control Using Indoor Simulated Rain Events on Small Plots
	9830	Photo	Wood shreds being drop from a cargo net and Heli-Claw.
	9829	Photo	Wood shreds being picked up with Heli-Claw
	9828	Photo	Rill simulation experiment at Terrace Mountain Fire, BC, Canada. Green dye is for photo enhancement.
	9827	Photo	Rainfall simulation experiment at Terrace Mountain Fire, BC, Canada
	9826	Photo	Hillshope plot fences to measure erosion from the Terrace Mountain Fire, BC, Canada

Supporting Documents

There are no supporting documents available for this project.

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