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Project ID:

09-2-01-10

Year:

2009

Date Started:

07/01/2009

Date Completed:

02/07/2012

Title:

Fire and Climate Change in the Western US: A New Synthesis for Land Management

Project Proposal Abstract:

A recent surge of scientific publications and interest in fire climatology derives in part from two new paradigms in climatology: (1) the discovery and understanding of broad-scale ocean-atmosphere oscillations (e.g., El Ni�o Southern-Oscillation) and their teleconnections to regional and continental temperature, precipitation and fire regimes, and (2) the mounting evidence of warming trends occurring at local to global scales that are largely driven by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and concurrent increases in areas burned and the length of fire seasons. In addition to these developments, fire and climate history datasets have greatly expanded and improved in the past decade. The increased availability of these datasets has facilitated a substantial increase in the literature of fire climatology encompassing both paleo (i.e., pre 1900) and modern time periods, especially for the western United States. Although many new insights have been gained, there is no overall, synthetic review or summary of western U.S. fire climatology literature to date. Nor is there a clear and comprehensive regionalization (from the literature or data) of fire-climate patterns, teleconnections, lagging relationships, etc., or evaluation of unknowns and limitations of fire climatology. Furthermore, we are in the early developmental stages of facilitating access to and use of fire history and fire climatology information by managers and policy makers (e.g., Predictive Services products). We also have much to learn from past fire-climate events and management/policy responses. We propose to carry out a project that meets the needs of syntheses, improved data access and communication, and learning from past management experiences and policy evolution. In particular, we propose to: (1) Review and synthesize existing literature, and conduct a quantitative evaluation of fire and climate history time series to define a geography of fire climatology of the western U.S. (lower 11 states). (2) Incorporate the fire-climate synthesis results into a set of existing online management decision support tools that have recently been developed as part of the International Multi-Proxy PaleoFire Database. The goal of this component will be to inform managers and decision makers about relationships between climate and fire under past, present, and potential future climate regimes. (3) Conduct a series of workshops and interviews with fire managers to define and explore the applications of fire climatology in fire management (especially resource allocation, appropriate management response, and fuels treatments), and to learn from past management responses to fire-climate events, and the resulting policy changes.

Principal Investigator:

Thomas W. Swetnam

Agency/Organization:

University of Arizona-Tucson

Branch or Dept:

Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Co-Principal Investigator	Donald A. Falk	University of Arizona-Tucson	School of Natural Resources & the Environment
Co-Principal Investigator	Elaine K. Sutherland	Forest Service	RMRS-Fire Sciences Lab-Missoula
Co-Principal Investigator	Peter M. Brown	Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, Inc
Co-Principal Investigator	Timothy J. Brown	Desert Research Institute	Division of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS)
Federal Cooperator	Elaine K. Sutherland	Forest Service	RMRS-Fire Sciences Lab-Missoula
Federal Fiscal Representative	Susan T. Major	Forest Service	RMRS-Rocky Mountain Research Station

Project Locations

Fire Science Exchange Network

Northwest

California

Great Basin

Northern Rockies

Southern Rockies

Southwest

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

Download

Title
The Landscape Ecology of Fire	View
Climatic Inferences from Dendroecological Reconstructions	View
FACSheets: The Fire and Climate Synthesis Fact Sheet Series	View
Fact Sheet Describing the Project by E.K. Sutherland	View
Fact Sheet on Climate Teleconnections and Fire Climatology by P.M. Brown	View
Fact Sheet on Climate Change and Fire Climate by P.M. Brown	View
Fact Sheet on Climate and Fire Policy by Crystal Kolden	View
Fact Sheet on Best Management Practices in Using Fire Climatology by Crystal Kolden	View
Oversight Field Hearing Before the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, of the Committee on Natural Resources	View
Fire and Climate Variation in Western North America from Fire-Scar and Tree-Ring Networks	View
Fire in the West: A Burning Problem	View
Migration and Global Environmental Change in SF 10: Specification for a State of Science Review Wildland Fires	View
The Fire Climatology of the Western U.S.	View
Human Pyrogeography: A New Synergy of Fire, Climate and People is Reshaping Ecosystems across the Globe	View
The Ecological Society of America	View

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