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Fire regimes of red fir communities

• PACIFIC SOUTHWEST RESEARCH STATION
• LANDFIRE MODELING

PACIFIC SOUTHWEST RESEARCH STATION
The Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides a review and synthesis of the historical range of variability in red fir communities (Meyer 2016 [4]). It includes information on:

• Physical setting and geographic distribution
• Ecological setting
• Holocene history
• Cultural-socioeconomic setting
• Reference conditions
• Descriptions of natural range of variation including:
• plant community composition (geographic distribution of major hardwood species, successional changes, diversity)
• stand structure (age class; cover, density, and basal area; patch sizes; distribution of fuel loads)
• function (climate; disturbances including fire, grazing, insects and disease; wind and volcanism; climatic water deficit)
• Deviations from natural variation and future trends

The literature review of fire regimes occurs in the in the "NRV descriptions and comparisons to current conditions" section of this publication.

A red fir community at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park. Image by Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences. Used with permission.

LANDFIRE MODELING
LANDFIRE modeled succession and fire frequency of Biophysical Settings (BpSs). Table 1 summarizes LANDFIRE data on the BpSs for red fir communities. Figure 1 shows where they occur. Table A1 lists the BpSs and the results of LANDFIRE succession modeling for each BpS.

Figure 1—Distribution of red fir communities based on the LANDFIRE Biophysical Settings (BpS) data layer [3]. Numbers indicate LANDFIRE map zones. Click on the map for a larger image.

References: