[MCN] 1 in an ongoing debate re fire history in western US

[Lance Olsen]

PLOS ONE Published: May 19, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147688

Average Stand Age from Forest Inventory Plots 
Does Not Describe Historical Fire Regimes in 
Ponderosa Pine and Mixed-Conifer Forests of 
Western North America
Jens T. Stevens , Hugh D. Safford, Malcolm P. 
North, Jeremy S. Fried, Andrew N. Gray, Peter M. 
Brown, Christopher R. Dolanc, Solomon Z. 
Dobrowski, Donald A. Falk, Calvin A. Farris, 
Jerry F. Franklin, et al

Abstract [Open access]
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147688

Quantifying historical fire regimes provides 
important information for managing contemporary 
forests. Historical fire frequency and severity 
can be estimated using several methods; each 
method has strengths and weaknesses and presents 
challenges for interpretation and verification. 
Recent efforts to quantify the timing of 
historical high-severity fire events in forests 
of western North America have assumed that the 
"stand age" variable from the US Forest Service 
Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program 
reflects the timing of historical high-severity 
(i.e. stand-replacing) fire in ponderosa pine and 
mixed-conifer forests. To test this assumption, 
we re-analyze the dataset used in a previous 
analysis, and compare information from fire 
history records with information from co-located 
FIA plots. We demonstrate that 1) the FIA stand 
age variable does not reflect the large range of 
individual tree ages in the FIA plots: older 
trees comprised more than 10% of pre-stand age 
basal area in 58% of plots analyzed and more than 
30% of pre-stand age basal area in 32% of plots, 
and 2) recruitment events are not necessarily 
related to high-severity fire occurrence. Because 
the FIA stand age variable is estimated from a 
sample of tree ages within the tree size class 
containing a plurality of canopy trees in the 
plot, it does not necessarily include the oldest 
trees, especially in uneven-aged stands. Thus, 
the FIA stand age variable does not indicate 
whether the trees in the predominant size class 
established in response to severe fire, or 
established during the absence of fire. FIA stand 
age was not designed to measure the time since a 
stand-replacing disturbance. Quantification of 
historical "mixed-severity" fire regimes must be 
explicit about the spatial scale of high-severity 
fire effects, which is not possible using FIA 
stand age data.
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