Intermediate Priority Research Articles

Forest Restoration and Fire: Principles in the Context of Place

Abstract: There is broad consensus that active management through thinning and fire is urgently needed in many forests of the western United States. This consensus stems from physically based models of fire behavior and substantial empirical evidence. But the types of thinning and fire and where they are applied are the subjects of much debate. We propose that low thinning is the most appropriate type of thinning practice. Treating surface fuels, reducing ladder fuels, and opening overstory canopies generally produce fire‐safe forest conditions, but large, fire‐resistant trees are also important components of fire‐safe forests. The context of place is critical in assigning priority for the limited resources that will be available for restoration treatments. Historical low‐severity fire regimes, because of their current high hazards and dominance by fire‐resistant species, are the highest priority for treatment. Mixed‐severity fire regimes are of intermediate priority, and high‐severity fire regimes are of lowest priority. Classification systems based on potential vegetation will help identify these fire regimes at a local scale.

Poster 059. An Outcome-Based Analysis of Intermediate Priority Ambulance Dispatches

Poster 059. An Outcome-Based Analysis of Intermediate Priority Ambulance Dispatches

Information needs and priorities for assessing the sensitivity of marine birds to oil spills

Our experience in developing models to predict the potential impacts of oil spills on colonially breeding marine birds has revealed some major gaps in the information available on these systems. We consider the availability of data for a variety of parameters of seabird biology that are required in modelling efforts, and assign provisional priorities to our information needs. In order to develop means of predicting the impacts of oil spills on seabirds, we suggest that colony- or site-specific information on the timing of reproduction and colony occupancy, chick growth rates and body weights, several metabolic parameters, flight speed, and food load size is of relatively low overall priority. Intermediate priority is assigned to the collection of specific data on the dynamics of oil spills, the age and breeding structure of the populations, reproductive success, foraging activity budgets and flight paths, flight costs, and the response of growing chicks to food deprivation. We suggest that studies of seabird biology should give highest priority to obtaining information on population sizes, the probability of adult death upon encountering a spill, age-specific fecundity and survivorship, the time required in foraging trips, the lag time in the response of birds to an oil spill, foraging rate as a function of resource density, and changes in the availability of resources to the birds as a consequence of oil spills.

A Time-Dependent Complex System With Preemptive Priority Repairs

A repair system is analyzed that has three kinds of components, each with a different repair priority. Type 1 is essential to system operation and has the highest priority of repair; there is only one such component. Type 2 is nonessential (its failure degrades the system) and has an intermediate priority of repair. Type 3 is similar to type 2 except that it has the lowest priority of repair. There are many types 2 and 3 components. The differential equations for system state probabilities are solved by Laplace transforms, but only in implicit form.