Long-term patterns of post-fire harvest diverge among ownerships in the Pacific West, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: Post-fire harvest (PFH) is a forest management practice designed to salvage value from burned timber, mitigate safety hazards from dead trees, reduce long-term fuels, and prepare sites for replanting. Despite public controversy and extensive ecological research, little is known about how much PFH occurs on private and public lands in the U.S. Pacific West, or how practices changed with shifting forest policy and increasing area burned over the last three decades. We mapped PFH across 2.2 M burned hectares in California, Oregon, and Washington between 1986-2017 and used time series intervention analysis to compare trends in area, rate (% of burned area harvested), and mean patch size between private (0.5 M ha) and federal (1.6 M ha) forest land and across a gradient of burn severity. Harves

SUBMITTER: Zuspan A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11998924 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature