In Southwest Colorado, fuels specialists and researchers have come together to experimentally evaluate different silvicultural treatments for enhancing pinyon-juniper ecosystem health and reducing fire risk. This interdisciplinary team has implemented replicated silvicultural treatments that vary in spatial complexity and amount of thinning in pinyon-juniper woodlands spanning an elevational gradient.
A major goal of this effort is to understand how changes in woodland structure influence woodland health, including tree growth and mortality, pine nut production, and understory vegetation. Through fuels sampling and spatially explicit wildfire behavior modeling, this project will also assess how treatments influence fire behavior under varying weather conditions to aid future fuel treatment design and placement.
Learn more about this project on the Intermountain West JV website. Watch video >>
Photo by Megan McGrath, Intermountain West Joint Venture
