USGS · 1008337
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Jon E. Keeley. 2005. Chaparral fuel modification: what do we know --- and need to know?. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/1008337
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A major concern of land managers in the United States is the response of watersheds to weather after a wildfire. With an ever-expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI), land managers must be cognizant of potential damage to private property and other values at risk. In the United States, land-management agencies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) deploy Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams to address these concerns and to “prescribe and implement emergency treatments to minimize threats to life or property or to stabilize and prevent unacceptable degradation to natural and cultural resources resulting from the effects of a fire” (USDA Forest Service 2004, p. 17). BAER teams’ objective is emergency stabilization of burned areas, rather than long-term restoration of the landscape after a fire.
Wildfires are driven and restrained by an interplay of variables that can lead to many potential outcomes. As every wildland firefighter learns in basic training, the ability of a fire to spread is determined by three basic variables: fuel type and condition, weather, and topography. Fire suppression obviously plays a significant role in determining fire spread as well, so firefighter activity becomes an additional variable.
Understanding the historical pattern of human impacts on landscapes is critical to correctly interpreting the ecological basis for vegetation distribution. In some parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean Basin, a long and intensive utilization of resources has greatly altered the distribution of forests and woodlands. Was vegetation distribution in the coastal ranges of California similarly influenced by humans before Euro-American colonization?