Semiannual Newsletters

Since our first PFP meeting in September 2023, the WSU team has met approximately every two weeks to advance research on post-fire forest recovery and plan activities which promote collaboration between scientists and land managers. We have considered approaches to identify our partners’ management needs and gaps in knowledge, and we have developed survey and interview protocols to facilitate knowledge co-production. The PFP meeting in November 2023 involved many partners and generated a wide array of ideas regarding knowledge needs for post-fire recovery. For 2024, we have shifted our approach by organizing comparatively individualized meetings, to tailor conversations to the needs of specific groups of partners.

We recently developed a project website which showcases information regarding post-fire land management. The website exhibits this project’s progress and makes products readily available to our partners and the public. We welcome suggestions on how to maximize the utility of this site to our partners and the public. Moreover, we would like to highlight our partners on this website! To account for partners’ inputs, we are updating the website regularly.

Resist-Accept-Direct Framework

In several PFP meetings, the resist-accept-direct (RAD) framework has been a topic of discussion. Although not all land managers are aware of the RAD framework (Steen-Adams, personal communication), land managers are well-aware of the personnel and timeconstraints which present a need for information to help prioritize reforestation projects. The RAD framework presents three potential decision pathways for climate-adaptive reforestation projects: Resist vegetation conversions and attempt to restore a site to historical conditions; Accept that restoration attempts would be either futile or unnecessary and may not be worth investing in reforestation; and Direct vegetation composition to a climate-adaptive state by planting species that are more well-suited for future climate conditions. Continued discourse within the PFP will facilitate application of the RAD framework to post-fire land management, by providing further information to land managers regarding which RAD decision pathway best suits the site of interest.

Spectral Recovery and Post-fire Forest Recovery

In early February, the WSU team submitted a manuscript entitled ‘A fast spectral recovery does not necessarily indicate post-fire forest recovery’ to Fire Ecology (Celebrezze et al., in revision; see graphical abstract above). In this work, we compare field measurements of post-fire community composition in the Blue Mountains with spectral recovery, as determined by examining time series of data from satellite images (using indices of forest condition such as the normalized burn ratio). Our primary conclusions were: (1) a “fast” spectral recovery more often corresponds with the response of the evergreen shrub, snowbrush ceanothus, than post-fire forest recovery, (2) relationships between spectral recovery and field measurements of post-fire vegetation dynamics differ in different ecological contexts, and (3) predictive models for post-fire forest recovery perform best when including spectral recovery metrics and post-fire climate variables. These conclusions provide us with useful insights which guide predictions of post-fire vegetation dynamics in the Blue Mountains (Franz et al., in prep).

Climate-Adaptive Post-fire Land Management and Decision Support Tools (DSTs)

We are also developing a manuscript entitled ‘Applying a climate adaptive framework to post-fire management of forest landscapes in the U.S. Northwest: A review and synthesis of decision support tools’ (Steen-Adams et al., in prep). In this work, we compiled decision support tools (DSTs), conceptualized a climate adaptive framework for post-fire management (see above), and assessed DSTs. DST assessment involved evaluating user accessibility, determining which decision stage(s) tools are accessible to a variety of management organizations, and categorizing tools by tool type.