Fire Ecology in Rocky Mountain Landscapes is the first comprehensive review of scientific research on fire in Rocky Mountain ecosystems emphasizing the landscape scale. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with fire and fire management, including academic and agency scientists; natural resource professionals; and researchers, professors, and students involved with environmental science, land management, and resource management.

This edited volume presents original scientific research and knowledge synthesis covering the past, present, and potential future fire ecology of major US forest types, with implications for forest management in a changing climate. The editors and authors highlight broad patterns among ecoregions and forest types, as well as detailed information for individual ecoregions, for fire frequencies and severities, fire effects on tree mortality and regeneration, and levels of fire-dependency by plant and animal communities. The foreword addresses emerging ecological and fire management challenges for forests, in relation to sustainable development goals as highlighted in recent government reports. An introductory chapter highlights patterns of variation in frequencies, severities, scales, and spatial patterns of fire across ecoregions and among forested ecosystems across the US in relation to climate, fuels, topography and soils, ignition sources (lightning or anthropogenic), and vegetation. Separate chapters by respected experts delve into the fire ecology of major forest types within US ecoregions, with a focus on the level of plant and animal fire-dependency, and the role of fire in maintaining forest composition and structure. The regional chapters also include discussion of historic natural (lightning-ignited) and anthropogenic (Native American; settlers) fire regimes, current fire regimes as influenced by recent decades of fire suppression and land use history, and fire management in relation to ecosystem integrity and restoration, wildfire threat, and climate change. The summary chapter combines the major points of each chapter, in a synthesis of US-wide fire ecology and forest management into the future. This book provides current, organized, readily accessible information for the conservation community, land managers, scientists, students and educators, and others interested in how fire behavior and effects on structure and composition differ among ecoregions and forest types, and what that means for forest management today and in the future.

This state-of-knowledge review about the effects of fire on air quality can assist land, fire, and air resource managers with fire and smoke planning, and their efforts to explain to others the science behind fire-related program policies and practices to improve air quality. Chapter topics include air quality regulations and fire; characterization of emissions from fire; the transport, dispersion, and modeling of fire emissions; atmospheric and plume chemistry; air quality impacts of fire; social consequences of air quality impacts; and recommendations for future research.

Scientists have been warning for years that human activity is heating up the planet and climate change is under way. We are only just beginning to acknowledge the serious effects this will have on all life on Earth. The federal government is crafting broad-scale strategies to protect wildland ecosystems from the worst effects of climate change. One of the greatest challenges is to get the latest science into the hands of resource managers entrusted with vulnerable wildland ecosystems. This book examines climate and land-use changes in montane environments, assesses the vulnerability of species and ecosystems to these changes, and provides resource managers with collaborative management approaches to mitigate expected impacts. Climate Change in Wildlands proposes a new kind of collaboration between scientists and managers--a science-derived framework and common-sense approaches for keeping parks and protected areas healthy on a rapidly changing planet.

The health of many Rocky Mountain ecosystems is in decline because of the policy of excluding fire in the management of these ecosystems. Fire exclusion has actually made it more difficult to fight fires, and this poses greater risks to the people who fight fires and for those who live in and around Rocky Mountain forests and rangelands. This paper discusses the extent of fire exclusion in the Rocky Mountains, then details the diverse and cascading effects of suppressing fires in the Rocky Mountain landscape by spatial scale, characteristic, and vegetation type. Also discussed are the varied effects of fire exclusion on some important, keystone ecosystems and human concerns.