Spot-fire distance increases disproportionately for wildfires compared to prescribed fires as grasslands transition to Juniperus woodlands

Victoria M Donovan; Dillon T Fogarty; Dirac Twidwell

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0283816

Spot-fire distance increases disproportionately for wildfires compared to prescribed fires as grasslands transition to Juniperus woodlands

PLoS One. 2023 Apr 11;18(4):e0283816. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0283816. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Victoria M Donovan^{1

2}, Dillon T Fogarty¹, Dirac Twidwell¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America.
² School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, West Florida Research and Education Center, University of Florida, Milton, Florida, United States of America.

Abstract

Woody encroachment is one of the greatest threats to grasslands globally, depleting a suite of ecosystem services, including forage production and grassland biodiversity. Recent evidence also suggests that woody encroachment increases wildfire danger, particularly in the Great Plains of North America, where highly volatile Juniperus spp. convert grasslands to an alternative woodland state. Spot-fire distances are a critical component of wildfire danger, describing the distance over which embers from one fire can cause a new fire ignition, potentially far away from fire suppression personnel. We assess changes in spot-fire distances as grasslands experience Juniperus encroachment to an alternative woodland state and how spot-fire distances differ under typical prescribed fire conditions compared to conditions observed during wildfire. We use BehavePlus to calculate spot-fire distances for these scenarios within the Loess Canyons Experimental Landscape, Nebraska, U.S.A., a 73,000-ha ecoregion where private-lands fire management is used to reduce woody encroachment and prevent further expansion of Juniperus fuels. We found prescribed fire used to control woody encroachment had lower maximum spot-fire distances compared to wildfires and, correspondingly, a lower amount of land area at risk to spot-fire occurrence. Under more extreme wildfire scenarios, spot-fire distances were 2 times higher in grasslands, and over 3 times higher in encroached grasslands and Juniperus woodlands compared to fires burned under prescribed fire conditions. Maximum spot-fire distance was 450% greater in Juniperus woodlands compared to grasslands and exposed an additional 14,000 ha of receptive fuels, on average, to spot-fire occurrence within the Loess Canyons Experimental Landscape. This study demonstrates that woody encroachment drastically increases risks associated with wildfire, and that spot fire distances associated with woody encroachment are much lower in prescribed fires used to control woody encroachment compared to wildfires.

Copyright: © 2023 Donovan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Ecosystem
Forests
Grassland
Juniperus*
Wildfires*

Associated data

Dryad/10.5061/dryad.vmcvdncxs

Grants and funding

DT received funding Nebraska Game & Parks Commission (W-125-R-1) http://outdoornebraska.gov/ Nebraska Environmental Trust (20-139-2) https://environmentaltrust.nebraska.gov/ University of Nebraska’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources https://ianr.unl.edu/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.