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--></style><title>Real estate policy & fire: Save houses, and
wildlife too??</title></head><body>
<div>Syphard, A. D., V. Butsic, A. Bar-Massada, J. E. Keeley, J. A.
Tracey, and R. N. Fisher. 2016.</div>
<div><b>Setting priorities for private land conservation in fire-prone
landscapes: Are fire risk reduction and biodiversity conservation
competing or compatible objectives?.</b></div>
<div><i>Ecology and Society</i> 21(3):2.<br>
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08410-210302<br>
<br>
ABSTRACT</div>
<div>Although wildfire plays an important role in maintaining
biodiversity in many ecosystems, fire management to protect human
assets is often carried out by different agencies than those tasked
for conserving biodiversity. In fact, fire risk reduction and
biodiversity conservation are often viewed as competing objectives.
Here we explored the role of management through private land
conservation and asked whether we could identify private land
acquisition strategies that fulfill the mutual objectives of
biodiversity conservation and fire risk reduction, or whether the
maximization of one objective comes at a detriment to the other. Using
a fixed budget and number of homes slated for development, we
simulated 20 years of housing growth under alternative conservation
selection strategies, and then projected the mean risk of fires
destroying structures and the area and configuration of important
habitat types in San Diego County, California, USA. We found clear
differences in both fire risk projections and biodiversity impacts
based on the way conservation lands are prioritized for selection, but
these differences were split between two distinct groupings. If no
conservation lands were purchased, or if purchases were prioritized
based on cost or likelihood of development, both the projected fire
risk and biodiversity impacts were much higher than if conservation
lands were purchased in areas with high fire hazard or high species
richness. Thus, conserving land focused on either of the two
objectives resulted in nearly equivalent mutual benefits for both.
These benefits not only resulted from preventing development in
sensitive areas, but they were also due to the different housing
patterns and arrangements that occurred as development was displaced
from those areas. Although biodiversity conflicts may still arise
using other fire management strategies, this study shows that mutual
objectives can be attained through land-use planning in this region.
These results likely generalize to any place where high species
richness overlaps with hazardous wildland vegetation.<br>
<br>
<br>
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<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1"
color="#000000">^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^</font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1" color="#000000"><b>What
is a flash drought?</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="-1" color="#000000"><b>Could the
Imminent U.S. Heat Wave Trigger a Flash Drought?</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="-1" color="#000000">By: Bob Henson ,
12:36 AM GMT on<b> July 19</b>, 2016</font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b>Excerpt</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1" color="#000000"><b><br>
</b></font><font face="Geneva" size="-1" color="#000000">It wasn't too
long ago--in 2012--that a promising-looking spring morphed into a
terrible summer for the U.S. Midwest. A long-term drought that began
in late 2010 had intensified over the Southern Plains in 2011,
punishing farmers and ranchers and facilitating the loss of roughly
10% of all trees in Texas.<br>
<br>
The real shocker was how quickly drought conditions took hold further
north across the Midwest in the summer of 2012, leading to the most
widespread U.S. drought conditions since the 1930s. "Nobody called
that [in advance]," said Mark Svoboda (National Drought Mitigation
Center). Even NOAA's 30-day and seasonal drought outlooks from June
2012 failed to predict that month's emergence of drought in the
Midwest, according to Svoboda.<br>
<br>
While long-term drought can emerge simply through a lack of
precipitation, a flash drought is closely linked to hot summer
weather. The type of flash drought most often observed in the Midwest
develops as a torrid air mass sweeps in for a period of a few days to
several weeks.<br>
<br>
At first, the landscape may not be particularly dry, in which case
large amounts of water vapor flow from vegetation and soils into the
scorching surface air (as is expected later this week [July 19,
2016]). If the heat is strong and sustained enough, the landscape
quickly dries out and a flash drought takes hold.</font></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-2"
color="#FFFF00"><u
>https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/could-the-imminent-us-<span
></span>heat-wave-trigger-a-flash-drought</u></font></div>
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