Description | Speaker: Malcolm North – USFS, Pacific Southwest Research Station and SEFS Affiliate Faculty Title: “In dry western forests, what is resilience and can managed fire get us there?” Via Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92707468214 and In-Person in the Forest Club Room in Anderson Hall Description: With the increasing frequency and severity of altered disturbance regimes in dry, western U.S. forests, increasing the pace and scale of fuels treatment will require much wider use of managed fire. I will outline a concept, pyrosilviculture, designed to prioritize getting more prescribed fire and managed wildfire into western landscapes by leveraging the current patterns of wildfires, treatment limitations, and proposing new silvicultural treatments and managed fire objectives. Much of the focus of these treatments has been on increasing resilience, yet as a management objective the concept has been difficult to define and operationalize. Building on ecological theory, recent studies, and historical inventories, I suggest resilience in forests that historically had frequent-fire regimes may have resulted from very low tree densities, minimizing competition while supporting vigorous tree growth. I will discuss how this metric could be assessed, operationally applied, and what it might mean for changing current management practices. Every quarter, the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences holds weekly SEFS Seminars with faculty and experts. These seminars provide a space for presentation and discussion of a variety of topics relevant to the school and its students. Each seminar is held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesdays via both in-person presentation in the Forest Club Room and on Zoom. After each presentation, a Q&A discussion will be held. You can watch previous Seminars on the SEFS YouTube channel. |
---|