Abstract
Measuring wildland fuels is at the core of fire science, but many established field methods are not useful for ecosystems characterized by complex surface vegetation. A recently developed sub-meter 3D method applied to southeastern U.S. longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) communities captures critical heterogeneity, but similar to any destructive sampling measurement, it relies on separate plots for calculating loading and consumption. In this study, we investigated how bulk density differed by 10-cm height increments among three dominant fuel types, tested predictions of consumption based on fuel type, height, and volume, and compared this with other field measurements. The bulk density changed with height for the herbaceous and woody litter fuels (p < 0.001), but live woody litter was consistent across heights (p > 0.05). Our models predicted mass well based on volume and height for herbaceous (RSE = 0.00911) and woody litter (RSE = 0.0123), while only volume was used for live woody (R2 = 0.44). These were used to estimate consumption based on our volume-mass predictions, linked pre- and post-fire plots by fuel type, and showed similar results for herbaceous and woody litter when compared to paired plots. This study illustrates an important non-destructive alternative to calculating mass and estimating fuel consumption across vertical volume distributions at fine scales.
Highlights
Because of the prevalence of frequent, low-intensity fires in southeastern U.S pinelands, which are primarily propagated by fine surface fuels, understanding the spatial distribution of these fuels and their influence on fire behavior is imperative for advancing fire science relevant to prescribed fire management [20]
New approaches are needed for better fine-scale estimates of mass, volume, and bulk density of various fuel types found in frequently burned surface fire regimes
This study provides predictions on how biomass varies with fuel type, the volume occupied, and the height within the surface fuel layer, which can be used in fire behavior and fire effects studies that evaluate change in plant structure, mortality, reproduction, and composition patterns as well as fuel consumption at the same fine scale
Summary
The pace of discovery in wildland fire science has accelerated in the past two decades with technologically advanced instrumentation for measuring fire behavior [1,2], modeling of fire behavior in conjunction with atmospheric dynamics [3,4,5], and measuring fine- to coarse-scale attributes of vegetation using various remote sensing technologies [6,7,8,9,10] Despite these advancements, field vegetation and fuel sampling techniques have been generally stagnant since the 1970s and 1980s [11] and were mainly developed for dry western conifer/mixed-conifer forests where coarse woody fuels are a dominant fuel type [12]. New approaches are needed for better fine-scale estimates of mass, volume, and bulk density of various fuel types found in frequently burned surface fire regimes
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