|
Abstract:
|
Resilience, restoration and fuel treatments in the northern Rocky Mountains are complex and far different from those applicable to dry climax ponderosa pine forests. To address these objectives, we are developing and implementing integrative silvicultural methods and systems that are applicable for regenerating and growing a variety of species (early- to late-seral species), while maintaining forest characteristics that are relevant to many contemporary forest management objectives. These methods maintain multiple tree densities, a variety of canopy cover, and can enhance old-forest attributes and most importantly, the harvesting, mastication, grapple piling, and prescribed fire treatments we applied will modify both wildfire intensity and burn severity. We found that the heterogeneous forest structures we created, even with small openings (average size 2.6 ha) and the minor proportion of the landscape (3 percent) treated, would alter a wildfires flame length, and fire type, according to FlamMap and FARS ITE wildfire simulations. This analysis showed the placement, juxtaposition, and location of treatments within the landscape did alter how the fire progressed through the treatments under weather conditions that occurred during one of the worst fire seasons (1967) in the northern Rocky Mountains. In addition to developing and implementing the irregular selection silvicultural methods we also conducted a cost analysis where we compared mastication, grapple pile and burn, and prescribed fire. We will discuss the concept, implementation, and feasibility of irregular selection at meeting resilience, restoration, and fuels management objectives.
|
