The paper is aimed at assessing the associations between the road networks geography and dynamics of wildfire events in the East Siberian boreal forest. We examined the relationship between the function of roads, their use, and management and the wildfire ignition, propagation, and termination during the catastrophic fire season of 2016 in the Irkutsk Region of Russia. Document analysis and interviews were utilized to identify main forest users and road infrastructure functional types and examine wildfire management practices. We combined community observations and satellite remotely sensed data to assess relationships between the location, extent, and timing of wildfires and different types of roads as fire sources, barriers, and suppression access points. Our study confirms a strong spatial relationship between the wildfire ignition points and roads differentiated by their types with the highest probability of fire ignition near forestry roads and the lowest near subsistence roads. Roads also play an important role in wildfire suppression, working as both physical barriers and access points for firefighters. Our research illustrates the importance of local and Indigenous observations along the roads for monitoring and understanding wildfires, including “zombie fires”. It also has practical implications for fire management collectively developed by authorities and local communities.
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Mapping regional forest management units: a road-based framework in Southeastern Coastal Plain and Piedmont
Management practices are one of the most important factors affecting forest structure and function. Landowners in southern United States manage forests using appropriately sized areas, to meet management objectives that include economic return, sustainability, and esthetic enjoyment. Road networks spatially designate the socio-environmental elements for the forests, which represented and aggregated as forest management units. Road networks are widely used for managing forests by setting logging roads and firebreaks. We propose that common types of forest management are practiced in road-delineated units that can be determined by remote sensing satellite imagery coupled with crowd-sourced road network datasets. Satellite sensors do not always capture road-caused canopy openings, so it is difficult to delineate ecologically relevant units based only on satellite data. By integrating citizen-based road networks with the National Land Cover Database, we mapped road-delineated management units across the regional landscape and analyzed the size frequency distribution of management units. We found the road-delineated units smaller than 0.5 ha comprised 64% of the number of units, but only 0.98% of the total forest area. We also applied a statistical similarity test (Warren’s Index) to access the equivalency of road-delineated units with forest disturbances by simulating a serious of neutral landscapes. The outputs showed that the whole southeastern U.S. has the probability of road-delineated unit of 0.44 and production forests overlapped significantly with disturbance areas with an average probability of 0.50.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1702835
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10221731
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Forest Ecosystems
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 17
- ISSN:
- 2095-6355
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Research Highlights: We demonstrate a macroscale framework combining an invasibility model with forest inventory data, and evaluate regional forest exposure to harmful invasive plants under different types of forest protection. Background and Objectives: Protected areas are a fundamental component of natural resource conservation. The exposure of protected forests to invasive plants can impede achievement of conservation goals, and the effectiveness of protection for limiting forest invasions is uncertain. We conducted a macroscale assessment of the exposure of protected and unprotected forests to harmful invasive plants in the eastern United States. Materials and Methods: Invasibility (the probability that a forest site has been invaded) was estimated for 82,506 inventory plots from site and landscape attributes. The invaded forest area was estimated by using the inventory sample design to scale up plot invasibility estimates to all forest area. We compared the invasibility and the invaded forest area of seven categories of protection with that of de facto protected (publicly owned) forest and unprotected forest in 13 ecological provinces. Results: We estimate approximately 51% of the total forest area has been exposed to harmful invasive plants, including 30% of the protected forest, 38% of the de facto protected forest, and 56% of the unprotected forest. Based on cumulative invasibility, the relative exposure of protection categories depended on the assumed invasibility threshold. Based on the invaded forest area, the five least-exposed protection categories were wilderness area (13% invaded), national park (18%), sustainable use (26%), nature reserve (31%), and de facto protected Federal land (36%). Of the total uninvaded forest area, only 15% was protected and 14% had de facto protection. Conclusions: Any protection is better than none, and public ownership alone is as effective as some types of formal protection. Since most of the remaining uninvaded forest area is unprotected, landscape-level management strategies will provide the most opportunities to conserve it.more » « less
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Abstract As demand for wood products increases in step with global population growth, balancing the potentially competing values of biodiversity conservation, carbon storage and timber production is a major challenge. Land sparing involves conserving forest while growing timber in intensively managed areas. On the other hand, land sharing utilizes ecological forestry approaches, but with a larger management footprint due to lower yields. While the sparing‐sharing framework has been widely tested and debated in agricultural settings to balance competing values, such land‐allocation strategies have been rarely studied in forestry.
We examined whether a sparing, sharing or Triad strategy best achieves multiple forest objectives simultaneously. In Triad, management units (stands) in forest landscapes are allocated to one of three treatments: reserve (where conservation is the sole objective), intensive (timber production is the sole objective) and ecological (both objectives are combined). To our knowledge, ours is the first Triad study from the temperate zone to quantify direct measures of biodiversity (e.g. species' abundance).
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Sparing strategies were best when the services provided by both old‐growth and early seral (young) forests were prioritized, but at a cost to species associated with mid‐seral stages, which benefitted most from Triad and sharing strategies. Therefore, sparing provides the greatest net benefit, particularly given that old‐growth‐associated species and ecosystem services are currently of the greatest conservation concern.
Synthesis and applications . We found that maximizing multiple elements of biodiversity and ecosystem services simultaneously with a single management strategy was elusive. The strategy that maximized each service and species varied greatly by both the service and the level of timber production. Fortunately, a diversity of management options can produce the same wood supply, providing ample decision space for establishing priorities and evaluating trade‐offs. -
Landscapes are frequently delineated by nested watersheds and river networks ranked via stream orders. Landscapes have only recently been delineated by their interfluves and ridge networks, and ordered based on their ridge connectivity. There are, however, few studies that have quantitatively investigated the connections between interfluve networks and landscape morphology and environmental processes. Here, we ordered hillsheds using methods complementary to traditional watersheds, via a hierarchical ordering of interfluves, and we defined hillsheds to be landscape surfaces from which soil is shed by soil creep or any type of hillslope transport. With this approach, we demonstrated that hillsheds are most useful for analyses of landscape structure and processes. We ordered interfluve networks at the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), a North American Piedmont landscape, and demonstrated how interfluve networks and associated hillsheds are related to landscape geomorphology and processes of land management and land-use history, accelerated agricultural gully erosion, and bedrock weathering depth (i.e., regolith depth). Interfluve networks were ordered with an approach directly analogous to that first proposed for ordering streams and rivers by Robert Horton in the GSA Bulletin in 1945. At the Calhoun CZO, low-order hillsheds are numerous and dominate most of the observatory’s ∼190 km2 area. Low-order hillsheds are relatively narrow with small individual areas, they have relatively steep slopes with high curvature, and they are relatively low in elevation. In contrast, high-order hillsheds are few, large in individual area, and relatively level at high elevation. Cultivation was historically abandoned by farmers on severely eroding low-order hillsheds, and in fact agriculture continues today only on high-order hillsheds. Low-order hillsheds have an order of magnitude greater intensity of gullying across the Calhoun CZO landscape than high-order hillsheds. In addition, although modeled regolith depth appears to be similar across hillshed orders on average, both maximum modeled regolith depth and spatial depth variability decrease as hillshed order increases. Land management, geomorphology, pedology, and studies of land-use change can benefit from this new approach pairing landscape structure and analyses.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-33723/v1
