Adaptive Forest Management and Climate Change

Adaptive Forest Management Practices with Forest Fires and Climate Change

Under several modelling scenarios for future predictions of forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, the seasonal severity rating for forest fires is projected to increase only slightly on the western side of the Cascades, and to a greater extent on the eastside. Because forest fires alter forest structure, composition, and function, they are an important part of either a natural or an actively managed forest.

Managers pay attention to fuel availability and distribution, topography, temperature, relative humidity and wind velocity of the stands under their care. (All of these elements affect how a fire moves across a landscape.) To reduce vulnerability, managers alter the forest structure by removing standing dead trees and plant alternative species. To reduce the opportunity for the disturbance to occur, managers do controlled burns and regulate nonnative species introductions. To speed recovery, managers add structural diversity, plant late-successional species, or try to reduce environmental stresses. The entire time, managers need to actively monitor the state of the forest to determine interactions between disturbances of different types.

In Ashael Curtis and in the North Fork of the Teanaway River, National Forest Service managers are dealing with sites that are a significant distance away from urban areas. Tiger Mountain, on the other hand, is next to heavily populated areas, and as a result, DNR managers experience a great deal of pressure to suppress forest fires and not engage in controlled burning.

Fires tend to vary in frequency, size, intensity, seasonality and type depending on climatic conditions and the characteristics of the forest ecosystem being managed. Fire effects on forests can be profoundly damaging to younger stands by causing massive mortality or in some cases beneficial to the reproductive regenerative cycles of certain species of trees. Individual trees die in a fire, seeds germinate, and heterogenaity on the landscape tends to increase. Fire affects forest value for wildlife habitat, timber, recreation, and through smoke, human health.

References
Dale et al., "Climate Change and Forest Disturbances", BioScience, September 2001, Vol. 51 No 9, 723-734.

Bradley, Raymond S., "Past global changes and their significance for the future", Quarternary Science Reviews 19 (2000) 391-402.

Senkowsky, Sonya, "A Burning Interest in Boreal Forests: Researchers in Alaska Link Fires with Climate Change", BioScience, November 2001, Vol. 51, No 11, 916-921.

Aber et al., "Forest Processes and Global Environmental Change: Predicting the Effects of Individual and Multiple Stressors", BioScience, September 2001, Vol. 51, No 9, 735-751.

Hansen et al., "Global Change in Forests: Responses of Species, Communities, and Biomes", BioScience, September 2001, Vol. 51, No 9, 765-779.

Cwynar, Les C., "Fire and the Forest History of the North Cascade Range", Ecology, 68(4), 1987, 791-802.

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