Recent decades have seen an increase in the frequency and extent of wildfire in the western United States. This, along with growing budgetary constraints, has made post-fire reforestation planning an ever more frequent but difficult task for forest managers. The CFER program, with funding from the Joint Fire Science Program, has initiated a study to develop a framework to better understand and quantify natural forest regeneration following wildfire and to bring this information into the post-fire planning process. A primary goal of this study will be to develop and test a management tool that can predict the abundance of natural regenerating conifers across a range of forest types in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of southwestern Oregon and northern California. This tool will consist of a predictive model with inputs that are readily obtained from general site-level information: elevation, aspect, and distance to seed source.
There are two parts of the study’s approach to modeling post-fire conifer regeneration, which are intended to complement one another: part 1 will investigate both temporal and spatial patterns of regeneration across the region, while part 2 will provide a spatially robust, but temporally limited, analysis of natural regeneration.
Although predictions of natural regeneration will be possible across a range of environmental settings, it is not possible to eliminate uncertainty altogether. However, this work is expected to provide a useful tool that will allow land managers to weigh the trade-offs between planting and not planting, and to do so within known confidence limits.
For more information on this study, please see the 2005 CFER Annual Report.
