Fire regimes & forest structure of Utah & eastern Nevada: A multi-scale history from tree rings

<>PRINCIPLE INVESTIGATORS

Emily K. Heyerdahl, Research Forester¹; Peter M. Brown², and Stanley G. Kitchen³

¹Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula Fire Sciences Lab
²Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research
³Rocky Mountain Research Station, Shrub Sciences Lab

INTRODUCTION

Before this project, Utah and eastern Nevada lacked dendrochronologically crossdated, site-specific fire and vegetation histories that provide crucial information for scientifically based fire, land, and natural resource management. Historical data are increasingly viewed as essential to assess the need for active management of different vegetation types and for justifying management actions within agencies and to the public. Fire regimes vary across space and through time in response to factors such as vegetation types, landscape physiography, and longer-term climate change. While 20th century records can help us understand the effects of recent fire exclusion on factors such as forest and fuel structure, we must look over longer time scales to better understand the influence of various forcings, such as climate changes and human land use, on fire occurrence and behavior. For further reading and understanding please see Fire Regimes and Forest Structure of Utah and Eastern Nevada: A Multi-Scaled History from Tree Rings.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

To reconstruct multi-century histories of fire and forest structure across a range of topography, forest type and regional climate at 15 systematically sampled sites in Utah and eastern Nevada, from tree rings.
To assess the confidence with which our fire and forest-structure histories can be extrapolated to unsampled areas, by inferring the drivers of spatial variation across the areas that we sample.
To infer the past climate drivers of regional-fire years in Utah.

FUNDING ORGANIZATIONS

We acknowledge funding from the Joint Fire Science Program under Project JFSP 03-1-1-07.
Rocky Mountain Research Station
Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, Inc
Bureau of Land Management (Utah State Office)
Fishlake National Forest

PRODUCTS AND PUBLICATIONS TO DATE

The Utah Fire History website.
Brown, P.M., E.K. Heyerdahl, S.G. Kitchen, and M.H. Weber. 2008. Climate effects on historical fires (1630-1900) in Utah. International Journal of Wildland Fire. 17:28-39.