Characterizing the Range and Variability of Pre-Management Era and Future Vegetation to Support Forest Plan Revision, Project-Level Planning, and Implementation in Central Oregon

Rebecca S.H. Kennedy, Thomas A. Spies, Melinda Moeur, and Miles A. Hemstrom

USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station

Sustaining late-successional forest and associated wildlife habitat is one of the primary goals of the Northwest Forest Plan, and is currently addressed through the implementation of late successional reserve areas throughout the Plan area. In disturbance-prone landscapes such as the dry physiographic provinces of the Plan area (e.g., Eastern Cascades, Klamath Mountains, etc.), achieving this goal involves addressing the risk of loss of old forest to stand-replacing disturbances resulting from fuels buildup and altered future climatic regimes. Managers and planners need better information about historical and potential future fire regimes and their effects on vegetation patterns to increase the likelihood of success of forest planning efforts. Under altered climatic regimes, shifts in potential vegetation types and modifications to fire regimes may have dramatic effects on potential future old forest amounts and their distribution across landscapes. We developed an approach that integrates spatial simulation modeling, probabilistic risk analysis, and geospatial technologies to characterize the historical range of variability and the potential future range of variability of fire regimes and resulting vegetation patterns, in the Deschutes National Forest landscape in central Oregon. We used landscape fire succession models (LADS and LANDSUM) to simulate fire, management, and insect and disease effects to develop multivariate statistical uncertainty clouds characterizing the historical range of variability in old forest and spatially explicit probability surfaces depicting the likelihood of production of late successional forest and other vegetation types across the Deschutes National Forest landscape. For scenarios of potential futures we plan to simulate changes resulting from current and altered climate regimes and various levels of management, using a dynamic vegetation model (MC1) to describe potential future shifts in the fire regime and vegetation patterns under altered climate regimes. Results will be useful to managers and policymakers involved in forest plan revision and project-level planning in fire-prone landscapes.

Biodiversity Session - Thursday Afternoon

corresponding author:

Rebecca S.H. Kennedy
USDA Forest Service
Pacific Northwest Research Station
3200 SW Jefferson Way
Corvallis, OR 97331
541-750-7262
rebeccakennedy@fs.fed.us

note: oral presentation only