We recently added a new member to our lab. Meet Rue, Pandemic Puppy. She’s a sweet 4th month old hound mix from a shelter in Portland. She likes cuddling and snacks but hates the rain.
Seminar at WSU Vancouver
Melissa gave a seminar about ReburnsAK at Washington State University Vancouver campus on 2.24.2020..
Seminar at UO
Melissa gave the Tea Talk seminar in the Geography Department at the University of Oregon on 2.20.2020. What a great department!
Shelby was selected as a NEON Early Career Scholar!
Shelby Weiss was selected as a NEON Early Career Scholar for ESA 2020 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Look for her at ESA!
Our new paper featured in Science X Daily
New lab publication about wildfire in the west
Here we show that, while there is a strong negative feedback for very short reburning intervals throughout wildland forests of the Western US, that feedback weakens after 10-20 years. Also, the relationship between reburning intervals and drought diverges depending on location, with coastal systems reburning quicker (e.g., shorter interval between fires) in wetter conditions and interior forests in drier. This supports the idea that vegetation productivity – primarily fine fuels that accumulate rapidly (<10 years) – is of primary importance in determining reburn intervals.
Buma B, SA Weiss, K Hayes and MS Lucash. 2020. Wildland fire reburning trends across the US West suggest only short-term negative feedback and differing climatic effects.
Accepted to Environmental Research Letters doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab6c70
Finishing up your PhD or Postdoc this winter or spring? Join our lab!
Want details about the postdoc opening on our Siberia project? Click here. We start reviewing applications on 1/6/20.
Shelby, Jannike, and Melissa are headed to AGU!
We are presenting posters at #AGU2019 about our work in Alaska.
Details about all the talks and posters associated with the ReburnsAK project can be found here: https://www.reburnsak.com/blog
AFE talks in Tucson
Melissa and Shelby co-authored several talks at the AFE (American Fire Ecology) conference in Tucson, Arizona from Nov 18-22, 2019:
Negative feedbacks among multiple disturbances in north-central Minnesota (Lucash, Scheller, Gustafson, and Sturtevant
Continued repeat burning in the boreal causes continued ecosystem transformation (Hayes, Buma, Lucash, Weiss)
Rates of short-interval fires increasing across the U.S. West (Buma, Hayes, Weiss and Lucash)
AFE venue in Tucson, AZ. It was gorgeous!
New lab publication in Ecosphere
Widespread severe wildfires under climate change lead to increased forest homogeneity in dry mixed‐conifer forests.
Brooke Cassell, RM Scheller, MS Lucash, MD Hurteau, and EL Loudermilk. 2019.
Ecosphere 10( 11):e02934. 10.1002/ecs2.2934
Under a warming climate, wildfires in Oregon's southern Blue Mountains will become more frequent, more extensive and more severe, according to a new Portland State University-led study.
Researchers from PSU, North Carolina State University, University of New Mexico and the U.S. Forest Service looked at how climate-driven changes in forest dynamics and wildfire activity will affect the landscape through the year 2100.
Their findings:
Even if the climate stopped warming now, high-elevation species such as whitebark pine, Engelmann spruce and sub-alpine fir will be largely replaced by more climate- and fire-resilient species like ponderosa pine and Douglas fir by the end of the century.
A growing population of shade-loving grand fir that has been expanding in the understory of the forest was also projected to increase, even under hotter and drier future climate conditions, which provided fuels that helped spread wildfires and made fires even more severe.
