Abstract
There is evidence that forest resiliency is declining in the western US due to recent increases in both areas burned by wildfire and the number of large fires. Fire refugia may increase forest resiliency; however, for land managers to incorporate fire refugia into their management plans, methods need to be developed to identify and rank criteria for what make fire refugia important. As part of a larger effort to build a spatially explicit ranking model for unburned islands in the inland northwestern US, we investigated the perceived importance of criteria used to inform a ranking model to identify high-value fire refugia. We developed a survey targeting land managers within the inland northwestern US. Participants were asked to score a predetermined list of criteria by their importance for determining the value of fire refugia. These scores were analyzed to identify trends among respondents that could be used to develop a fire refugia ranking model. The results indicate that respondents generally organized criteria into two groups: Human infrastructure and wildlife habitat. However, there was little consensus among respondents in their scoring of fire refugia importance criteria, suggesting that a single region-wide fire refugia ranking model may not be feasible. More research with a larger sample size is needed to develop targeted ranking models.
Highlights
Area burned by wildfire and the number of large wildfires have increased across the western United States despite decreased total ignitions [1] and relatively stable burn severity trends [2]
Our survey results suggest this mentality has carried over into more conservation-focused management strategies such as managing for fire refugia as well, which is intriguing as US Forest Service (USFS) must manage for threatened and endangered species and other non-infrastructure values as part of its multi-objective management mandate
Fire refugia are crucial for preserving critical ecosystem functions in fire-impacted landscapes [14]
Summary
Area burned by wildfire and the number of large wildfires have increased across the western United States despite decreased total ignitions [1] and relatively stable burn severity trends [2]. This is in large part due to fire and land management practices [3] and anthropogenic climate change [4]. In the inland northwestern US, this includes reduced tree regeneration in burned areas [7], higher than expected burn severity amidst a substantial fire deficit [8], and the contemporary loss of historical fire refugia that survived multiple previous wildfires [9].
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