The Fire and Fire Surrogate Study: Berkeley Forests, 2001-2020

Dry forests throughout the western United States are fire-dependent ecosystems, and much attention has been given to restoring their ecological function. For this reason, land managers often are tasked with reintroducing the fire process via prescribed fire and fire-surrogate treatments (such as thinning and mastication). During planning, managers are expected to anticipate the effects of management actions on forest structure, ecological function, and future fire behavior. In the case of fire surrogate treatments, managers must understand which components or processes are changed or lost, and with what effects, if treatments such as thinning and mastication are used instead of fire or in combination with fire.

As such, a nationwide research effort, The Fire and Fire Surrogate Study, commenced in 2001 to evaluate the impacts of prescribed fire and mechanical fuel reduction treatments. As part of this national effort, a suite of fuel treatments was implemented in 2001 at Blodgett Forest Research Station, which is owned and operated by UC Berkeley Forests, in the northern Sierra Nevada. The Fire and Fire Surrogate Study at Blodgett Forest Research Station is comprised of a network of twelve stands, ranging in size from 35-70 acres, each of which was randomly assigned one of four possible treatments, which represent the basic range of forest restoration and fire hazard reduction options. The treatment options initiated at Blodgett Forest were:

1) Control: no active management.

2) Fire-only: prescribed fire applied to the forest stand.

3) Mechanical-only: Crown thinning followed by commercial thinning from below, which removed mid and larger sized trees, followed by mastication, which chipped/shredded smaller trees in place leaving 10% of them in clumps throughout the forest stand.

4) Mechanical + fire: same mechanical treatment described above, followed by prescribed fire.

This dataset contains longitudinal information about forest and fuels composition, as well as understory cover in Blodgett Forest. Forest data contains tree information by individual including species, status, dbh, height, and crown height information. Fuel data are composed of Browns transect measurements for litter, duff, fine woody debris and coarse woody debris. Understory cover data are composed of shrub composition by species, percent cover, and modal height, while forb and grass data are composites of plot-level percent cover by life form.