Analysis of Ecological Condition as a Result of Alternative Fuel Treatment Strategies

Current wildland fire management policy aims to restore the integrity and sustainability of fire-adapted ecosystems and in doing so has adopted concepts that incorporate the ecological role of fire, such as natural variability and condition class, into the planning process. Condition classes are a function of the degree of departure from historical fire regimes resulting in alteration of key ecosystem components such as species composition, structural stage, stand age, and canopy closure. It is not well understood, however, what effect the application of these concepts to management will have on ecological condition at broad temporal and spatial scales. Natural processes will continue to occur and recur simultaneously with management and the interactions of succession, disturbance, and treatment will result in varied trajectories of vegetative change. It is often the disturbance processes with a low probability of occurrence, such as a stand-replacement wildfire or severe bark beetle outbreak, that determine the pattern of a landscape and future events for extended periods of time. In this project, the condition class concept was applied to a spatially explicit simulation model (SIMPPLLE) in order to account for the spatial and temporal variability as well as the contagion or "spatial dependence" of natural processes and treatments. Using this approach, the effects of alternative fuel treatment strategies were analyzed on a 467,375-acre landscape in Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana.

Principal investigator: Don Helmbrecht