Research Briefs Look here for plain language summaries of Appalachian Fire Science. Have a suggestion for an article or topic you'd like us to summarize? Contact us! Direct and indirect effects of fire on germination of shortleaf pine seeds Hope Fillingim, Benjamin Knapp, John Kabrick, Michael Stambaugh, Grant Elliott, and Dan Dey Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Burning for Oak Regeneration: A Fire-free Period after Repeated Burns Promotes the Development of Oak Saplings, but Red Maple Competition Persists Beth Blankenship, Zachary Poynter, and Mary Arthur Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Spiders’ Response to Fire and Fire Surrogate Treatments in the Southern Appalachians Campbell, J.W., Grodsky, S.M., Milne, M.A., Vigueira, P., Vigueira, C.C., Stern, E. and Greenberg, C.H. Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Early Growing-Season Prescribed Fires Shown to Burn More Completely and at Greater Intensity than Dormant Season-Burns Matthew Vaughan, Donald Hagan, William Bridges, Matthew Dickinson, and Adam Coates Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Pennsylvania Private Forest Landowners Desire to Use Prescribed Fire Arun Regmi, Melissa Kreye, and Jesse Kreye Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Soil Seed Banks and the Restoration Potential of Fire-adapted Species in the Allegheny Plateau, West Virginia Cynthia Huebner, Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, and Chris Underwood Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles Predicting the Future of Wildfire in the Southern Appalachian Region Robbins, Z.J., Loudermilk, E.L., Mozelewski, T.G. Brief PDF Full Article Similar Articles

Connecting fire managers and scientists throughout the Appalachians. Resources Search our resource collection for videos, publications, guides and all things fire science! Or, click a link below to see resources by type. Publications Search our publication collection for guides, syntheses, research, and research briefs. Videos Check here for recordings of presentations, webinars, field tours and more! This page is linked to the CAFMS Youtube Channel. Newsletter Archive Look through our previous newsletters to find research briefs, useful links, and information about events and things going on throughout the region. Fire Frequency Tool This tool was developed to evaluate fire's cumulative impact, calculate frequency, examine seasonality and estimate fuel accumulation to facilitate decision making in targeting successive prescribed fire application. For use with ArcGIS- Can't find what you're looking for? Reach out! We're happy to help you find any resources you need.

Publications To find peer-reviewed publications, guides, articles and more click on one of the Appalachian fire science topics below. You can also use our search bar or contact us to help find what you are looking for. 2023 Appalachian Fire Science Papers Amphibians & Reptiles Chemistry/ Nutrients Controlled Burns Fire and Fire Surrogate Study Bats Chestnut Editorial/ Public Outreach Fire History Birds Climate & Weather Fact Sheets/ Briefs Fire Techniques Fuels Insects/ Arachnids Law & Policy Mammals Oak Pine Smoke/Emissions Social Science/ Communication Soils & Duff Syntheses & Guides Wildfire Water Appalachian Fire Science CAFMS office is located in Clemson, SC. We disseminate peer-reviewed publications and articles providing fire managers with scientific research that encompasses the broad heterogeneity of the region. The collaboration between fire managers and scientists builds trust and communication that work together to improve land management. Joint Fire Science Program Appalachian Region CAFMS is a member of the JFSP Fire Science Exchange Network

After performing a prescribed burn in the Big Mountain area of the Monongahela National Forest, Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy with the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station describes the unexpected fire effects between chestnut oak and northern red oak. In 2019, the Forest Service used prescribed fire in the Big Mountain area of the Monongahela National Forest in Pendleton County, WV for sustainable forest management. Across much of the Monongahela and the eastern United States in general, foresters and ecologists are seeing forest overstories become dominated by one type of tree but the understories, often the next generation of trees, is of a different species. Oak forests are slowly being replaced by maple species in a process called mesophication. In this process, lower fire frequency creates conditions where a species not well-adapted to fire gains a foothold and then flourishes as fire is excluded for an extended time. Prescribed fire was used at the Big Mountain area to create change in the understory and the forest floor, which would help reverse the mesophication process. After the fire, a timber harvest was planned to remove some of the overstory trees. Before the formation of the Monongahela National Forest, much of WV’s forests were changed by the exploitative, extractive logging of the turn of the 20th century. At that time, little thought was given to more than one harvest in these forests, or to what trees were left behind. The slash, tree tops, branches, and other unmerchantable material left in the woods dried out and became fuel for fires that were uncharacteristically large in size and intensity. As the forests of WV regrew, this legacy was a vivid caution of the destructive nature of fire. Fire suppression and cessation became a driving forest management practice and policy.  Without fire for approximately 100 years, mountain laurel in the Big Mountain area regrew, likely to densities and heights that it would not have reached without fire suppression. The prescribed burn did successfully remove the understory as planned. Overstory trees were unexpectedly affected, including oak trees that had been planned for harvest. Dead and alive trees were chosen from the burn units for an on-site demonstration of fire effects to overstory trees. Butt logs from trees in the burn units were sawed into rough boards to see how far into the tree the fire damage had occurred, if at all. Among the logs to be sawn were a chestnut oak and a northern red oak. In fire ecology terms, chestnut oaks have more fire-adapted traits than northern red oak including thick bark to protect the living part of the tree bole. Trees grow taller from the tips of branches, from structures called apical meristems, and grow fatter from lateral meristems. Lateral meristems along branches, roots, and trunk, just under the bark of a tree, and are divided into two different tissues called vascular cambium and cork cambium. Vascular cambium produces phloem tissue (food-carrying) on its outer surface and xylem cells (water-carrying) on the inner side. In the cork cambium, cork cells are produced on the outer side and starch-storing cells on the inner. When cork cells die, they become bark. Chestnut oak produces more cork cells than other oaks and certainly more bark cells than a red maple. Considering that this takes energy and represents a trade-off for the tree from the production of other cells and tissues, there is likely an evolutionary basis for this difference. This thick bark protects the living cambium from harm from a variety of causes – drying out during a drought, rubbing from deer horns, and direct heating from fire. Species are adapted to a fire regime, defined in part with an intensity and frequency, and not just one fire. Oaks, in general, are adapted to low to moderate intensity fires that occur fairly frequently. Like other oaks, chestnut oak seedlings can resprout from buds just under the ground line where living tissues are protected from the heat of fire by soil. Although the top of a small tree or seedling is killed by fire or drought, small oaks can regain height rapidly after this type of disturbance. Not only is their ability to recover their height rapidly connected to soil protected buds, but also by the growth habitat of their root systems. Oaks tend to place more energy into growing a deep, tap-root.  A short-statured oak seedling may have a thick root, indicating an older seedling than might be expected based on height alone. In this thick root, food is stored for the inevitable need to resprout the top in response to the loss of the top part of the seedling. While most oaks have some measure of fire-adaptation the greatest difference between chestnut oak and northern red oak is bark thickness. Based on this short introduction to fire ecology, you might predict that the chestnut oak in the Big Mountain controlled burn area would have less fire damage than the northern red oak. That’s what I thought I’d see at the saw demonstration. However, even before the saw cut into the logs the differences in fire effects were clear. The whole 10-foot section of the chestnut oak log was black, with the scorch covering the whole circumference. The northern red oak had a scorched area of approximately 3 feet tall and only on one side of the tree. When these trees were chosen for our demonstration, the northern red oak was alive and the chestnut oak dead. As we talked about what we were seeing during the demonstration, the foresters who had harvested the trees noted that the chestnut oak had been growing in a patch of dense and tall mountain laurel. Mountain laurel is a fire-adapted shrub of the heath family with flammable, evergreen leaves. The northern red oak grew in a more mesic spot not surrounded by flammable shrubs. This buildup of fuel may explain why my initial thoughts on fire effects between the two trees were incorrect. Under an altered fire regime, the chestnut oak growing on a drier spot in the forest stand ended up surrounded by tall mountain laurel. The tree’s thick bark may not have been thick enough to protect the cambium from the fire’s heat and direct flame contact. The northern red oak, having found a slightly wetter spot to grown on, didn’t have the threat of increased fuels since mountain laurel doesn’t compete as well on the site with more moisture and shade. Even though the bark of the northern red oak is not as thick and protective as the bark of the chestnut oak, the fire had less heat in this spot. We found that when the logs were cut into boards, neither log showed much damage beyond the first 1” to ¾” thick board. The current guidelines for using prescribed fire to help oak forests remain oak-dominated can include increasing light levels in the mid story for the oak seedlings that respond to the fire. In some areas it may be possible to do this by commercial timber harvest. As such, the wounding of trees by fire and the potential of value loss is an important consideration. The scorch seen on the logs may also be a concern for those assuming a loss of timber value. Quantifying these impacts to timber value is a next step for researchers and managers on the Monongahela National Forest. Melissa is a Research Forester at the USFS Timber and Watershed Laboratory. Her research includes stand and landscape-level projects focused on restoration and sustainable management of forests in the eastern US. These projects include investigating the role of fire in oak forests, using witness trees to understand historical forest conditions, restoration of red spruce forests, and restoration of American chestnut.

For the past 7 ½ years, my title has been Public Information Coordinator for the Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers & Scientists. It always felt like way too many words, especially considering how much time I spent compressing detailed management plans or years of fire science into blurbs and tweets. I’ve recently accepted a new opportunity with the National Forests in North Carolina, so today is my last day in a role that I’ve been honored to serve in, despite its cumbersome title. Working for a connector organization like CAFMS, your day-to-day work can be hard to describe. I can’t count the number of times when someone I’ve worked with for years finally screwed up the courage to ask, Wait, who do you work for? What do you do again? or What exactly is a consortium? *see footnotes for answers I was given a mission to “stay flexible and meet the needs in the region”. I’ve felt privileged to serve that mission because it gave me a lot of room to stretch myself and experiment with projects and ideas. For the most part, I focused on really understanding the story of fire in the Appalachians. The history of it. The research we have and the research we need. Knowing who will do backcountry burning and who is working to make communities Firewise. It seemed like if I followed the story, built trust with the storytellers, and listened to the details, I could identify and meet needs. In fact, I built this blog to “tell the story behind the science”. So now it seems only fitting that I take this opportunity to tell the story – behind the story – behind the science. Ever committed to structured storytelling, I’ll start at the beginning: The Beginning On my first day, Helen Mohr (Director of CAFMS) gave me the only direct order she has ever given me in the entire time I’ve worked for her. She said, “don’t ever take time away from your family or your life for this job.” I was shocked and assumed she wasn’t serious. Until that point working in conservation and natural resources seemed inseparable from being taken for granted or working for free so that I could “prove myself” and “gain experience”. But Helen and our Principal Investigator, Todd Hutchinson, consistently backed up that directive. When my husband was given an international assignment, they supported me working remotely from Shanghai. Any time my kids or my family needed me, I was able to be there without feeling torn. Before I agreed to take a new job, I painstakingly weighed having Helen and Todd in my corner against quantifiable benefits. Through all the years, through a pandemic, and even while living on the other side of the world, I always felt supported and appreciated and I am so grateful to have had that since day one. The Middle As I settled into working for CAFMS, I got to know our cast of characters in the fire world - and I mean characters. Seriously, these personality types could fill epic novels (or at least a few reality shows). On every single field tour, I’ve watched as people break away from presentations to whittle, forage, poke around in the plants, catch critters, and be present in a way that is atypical for grown professionals. It always made me feel like I was at home with my kind of people. What is it about fire folk? Through various jobs and earning my degrees, I have never met a group of people so brilliant and wildly dedicated. Fire attracts people who want to think deeply about a problem and work with others to solve it. It takes an adventurous spirit, a particular type of humility, and sits at this nexus of science and art and philosophy. I don’t know who started calling this professional network “the fire family”, but it rang true the first time I heard it. When I think about Helen’s words on my first day, I laugh a little because this job came with a family of its own. And I know that family is one of those words that carries all kinds of weight. Like any family we have our tensions and disagreements, but we usually find a way through them. To me, the fire family speaks to relationships that have been intentionally nurtured to build a foundation for successful projects. That foundation makes it possible to share our struggles and celebrate our wins. It makes it easier to respond to crises. The fire family means meetings are fun and we’re all more effective as individuals, groups, and agencies. I still wonder how I lucked into a professional group where I saw faces of pure joy when I had to bring my infant to work. When I had to leave for a week on short-notice to handle a family emergency I didn’t return to an inbox full of frustration. Instead, I received a small flood of messages expressing love and support. It's hard to capture what working in that kind of environment means. I know it has changed me, personally and professionally, by changing my expectations. I’m more fully integrated as a person because I haven’t been forced to hide any need or concern. I’m a better teammate because I’ve been encouraged to speak up without fearing conflict. It’s allowed me to be more resilient and pay it forward to build a more supportive foundation for others. The Next Chapter When I first took this position, I thought it would be a 2-3 year stint before I moved on to some “real science” job. Looking back, I don’t even know what that means, but I’ll blame it on the influence of being fresh out of grad school. I knew I liked fire and talking to people about science and seeing science used on the ground. I had been frustrated by academic approaches that hemmed and hawed and theorized when we had real problems to solve on the land. I found exactly what I was looking for in CAFMS; a chance to connect and learn and make an impact. This job helped me realize that I’m naturally kind of a collector of people’s stories. I swear I can physically feel it when someone tells me a good one. It sits somewhere in my viscera and the stories cozy up like little knick-knacks in a shadow box. And I’ve been good at telling other people’s stories because I treasure them. They make me stronger and allow me to connect more easily with others. I hate to summarize it all like some annual report, but the stories make it possible to be more effective at building networks and more prepared to solve problems. If you curate them just right, the stories become an almost measurable resource, a perfect composite of pure love and useful data. The only potential downside of carrying others’ stories is that it can be hard to separate from them and tell my own. A few years ago, I designed a media training for the Southern Blue Ridge TREX (happening again this fall, APPLY BY JULY 17). I challenged our participants to tell their “TREX story” on camera. At some point, one of them gave me a taste of my own medicine and asked “well, Jen, what about you?” I told them that observing and sharing their stories was a satisfying journey in itself and that’s true about my entire time with CAFMS. So, to every researcher, ranger, student, collaborator, landowner, land manager, -ologist, passerby, and friend that has been part of my fire family, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I am so honored to have been trusted with your stories. I will continue to carry them with me as part of my own. All of that said, there will be a job opening soon. It has a clunky title and I don’t know if the benefits or duties will change. I can tell you it comes with endless support and an incredible supervisor and PI. They’re the kind of people you want to be when you grow up. It’s the kind of gig where you can really get things done, build a family, and become a better version of yourself. It’s the reason why my first question for my new supervisor was "can I still do fire things?” The good news is that I can. Fire family forever - I can’t wait to catch up after I make this transition and hear all your stories. * Footnotes Wait, who do you work for? Please see our “About Us” page for details on the Joint Fire Science Program and the Fire Science Exchange Network. I was a Clemson employee hired through an agreement with JFSP to work for CAFMS. What do you do again? All sorts of things. I managed social media accounts, did graphic design, hosted a podcast, built websites, led communications teams, and occasionally I got to go outside and set things on fire. What is a consortium? In my first year with CAFMS, I complained about the word "consortium" because I felt like no one knew what it meant. It’s kind of like a guild or a community of practice, except instead of being pollinators or blacksmiths, we do fire stuff. I eventually came around on the term, but calling this group of people a consortium is definitely underselling it.

After 30 years as a Forest Ecologist at the University of Kentucky (UK), Mary Arthur is shifting her life's focus to a "retirement" stage. She took some time to reflect on her incredible, influential career for our new CAFMS blog. Read the story behind the science, below. When I moved to Kentucky with my 6-month-old daughter on New Year’s Day 1993, the U-Haul loaded with all of our belongings broke down a mile from our new home in frigid weather that dropped to -4F overnight. We found someone to tow the truck to our new (old) house, where we found that the roof was leaking into the downstairs bedrooms. Welcome to Kentucky! This was an inauspicious start, especially since before interviewing for an Assistant Professor position at UK I could barely find Kentucky on a map. Fortunately, I like the cold and if you love forests and the intricate dialogue between humans and the environment, Kentucky has a way of growing on you. As a new professor at a land-grant University, I was tasked with identifying a research focus that is relevant to the region. I had worked in New York, in northern hardwood forests, and Colorado, where I conducted my PhD research tracing nutrients through a subalpine spruce-fir forest. I initially had little to go on as a starting place for my Kentucky-based research, and a very short timeline to sort it out! The high tree species diversity of Kentucky’s forests alone overwhelmed my tree ID skills; I felt like I was starting at zero. Happily, several faculty saw my need for local knowledge, helped me hone my ID skills in a new forest, and shared their knowledge of the ecology of the region. I quickly discovered the rich human and ecological history held within Kentucky’s forests. Unraveled through information from archaeology, palynology, forest ecology, and historical accounts, these histories shed light on the complicated impacts that humans have had on forest structure and species composition over thousands of years. In the early 1990s, much of what I now know about the presence of Indigenous Peoples and their use of forests was still emerging, whereas the impacts of Euro-Americans were more readily-available in written histories and thus more visible on the landscape. As I was casting about for research ideas centered in Kentucky to complement my research program in the northern hardwood forest, I looked for opportunities to learn more about the ecological impacts of disturbances mediated by current human populations. A colleague mentioned that in the Red River Gorge Geological Area (RRGGA) of the Daniel Boone National Forest (DBNF), ridgetops were increasingly dominated by white pine, and that this increasing prevalence was linked to the absence of fire on those uplands. Forest Service managers were looking to partner with a researcher at UK to experiment with the use of prescribed fire to reverse this encroachment. The expansion of white pine on ridgetops had been linked to active suppression of fires since the 1930s, based on former U.S. Forest Service (USFS) employee Rita Wehner’s research dating white pine trees on these ridges. I soon learned that neither the historical and ecological role of fire in these ecosystems, nor the impacts of fire suppression, had been firmly established as key factors influencing forest dynamics in this region. I jumped into a collaboration with the DBNF with great excitement to be starting on my Kentucky-based research, and a good amount of naiveté for where it would all lead. So much of what I learned about the forests in the RRGGA, I learned from the District Ranger Donnie Richardson, who gently and respectfully shared his decades of on-the-ground knowledge with me and encouraged and supported the research. As it turned out, this initial foray into prescribed fire research yielded the clearest results of my career: prescribed fire is highly effective in killing white pine trees less than 6 inches in diameter and 30 years of age; repeated every 10-15 years, the understory can effectively be kept free of new white pine seedlings and saplings. That initial study with its clear results opened the door for a central focus of my career by revealing that white pine was just one small element of the forest dynamics unfolding in these forests in the absence of fire. In retrospect, it was apparent that white pine was just the flag, visually signaling the change that was afoot. As an evergreen, it was easy to spot in the understory and much easier to see than the shifting composition of understory deciduous tree species; a phenomenon that was later described as “mesophication” by Nowacki and Abrams (2008). We had essentially solved the fire riddle related to white pine, so I adjusted my focus. I found a new set of important questions about how fire influences the dramatic increase in the mesophytic hardwood species like red maple. This increase lowers light levels to the point that oak seedlings can't develop to saplings or grow into the overstory. At that point, the focus of my research shifted to exploring how prescribed fire, and repeated fire, altered forest regeneration patterns and longer-term regeneration processes. Through this research I was able to initiate a vital and long-term collaboration with the DBNF. We experimented with repeated prescribed fire and a fire-free interval to examine the impacts on upland oak forest dynamics. Our research on the effects of prescribed fire on forest stand dynamics and oak seedling establishment and development unfolded over 25+ years and demonstrated that prescribed fire has modest positive effects on oak regeneration, particularly notable after a fire-free interval. Perhaps more importantly, the continued absence of fire clearly leads to continuous in-growth of mesophytic, fire-sensitive species, like red maple, in the understory and into the canopy. Thus, the failure to burn, or disturb these stands in other ways, will lead to the continued closing of the canopy and reduced oak recruitment. Beyond the relationships between fire and oak regeneration, our findings also demonstrated how the absence of fire alters forest hydrology, leaf litter composition and decomposition, and fuels. As we were developing this important body of research on prescribed fire, the forest managers kept sharing different, more positive stories about the effects of fire on oak regeneration. I thought that their insights might be tied to sites where uncontrolled fire, or wildfire, had been present. I hoped for an opportunity to study the effects of wildfires, which typically burn with more variable severity than prescribed fires and include some patches of very high severity. In 2010, the Fishtrap wildfire was accidentally started while a fire ban was in effect during an exceptionally dry fall in the RRGGA. It burned 674 ha of forest land over two weeks, from late October until November 9th, before it was fully contained. Despite hundreds of campers sleeping nearby when the fire started, everyone was safely evacuated. This fire provided an opportunity to examine the ecological effects across a gradient of burn severity because it occurred primarily on US Forest Service land, where our partnership paved the way to learn about the impacts. My research group initiated a study of the effects on species composition, regeneration, and forest dynamics, in close collaboration with DBNF personnel. Key findings from this work illustrated that higher fire severity is linked with greater regeneration success of oaks and pines, whereas mesophytic species such as red maple are agnostic to fire severity, regenerating with equal success across sites regardless of burn severity. Current research on the Fishtrap site (led by my final MS student) explores the relationship between burn severity, forest stand structure, and microclimate, with the aim of learning more about how rapidly changing climate in combination with fire may alter forest conditions and species composition. And, as I clean out my office, including data files I found from my PhD dissertation research conducted more than three decades ago,- I am reflecting on the past 30 years as a Professor, returning again and again to a few questions: How does it all add up? What were the most important contributions of my career? How did I contribute to our understanding of fire in upland oak ecosystems of the Southern Appalachian region and the unfolding dialogue among managers and scientists around the use of prescribed fire? And, what were the key elements to building a fire ecology research program in Kentucky that helped to inform fire management practices in the region? From my current vantage point, much of what “adds up” to define a career well spent was being in a position to nurture undergraduate and graduate students in realizing their interests, passions, and abilities. I'm proud of being a part of launching future forest ecologists and natural resource professionals, a good many of whom eventually became colleagues in positions with state and local agencies and non-profits. Of course, more closely tied to what I was explicitly hired to do, to be a forest ecologist with a research program at a land-grant university, was the steady stream of research grants, scientific publications, research presentations, and other metrics of a successful research career. Fortunately, the two were inextricably linked: running an active research program led to engaging students in the pursuit of answers to research questions that helped inform management decisions. My research program gave many students the opportunity to do field work, learn how science is done, and gain experience in their chosen field. Indeed, one of the great things about being a student at a land-grant university is that faculty are all fully engaged in research, and that research finds its way into the classroom and onto field trips, and provides opportunities for experiential learning. Throughout the 25+ years of research collaboration with the USFS DBNF, we have developed one of the longest-running fire research programs in the southern Appalachians. This partnership, and the work we have done together, has helped build our understanding of fire ecology in upland oak ecosystems. Along the way, we refined our understanding of the oak-fire hypothesis (Arthur et al. 2017) with the (now obvious) revelation that it isn’t fire, per se, that alters stand dynamics through impacts on seedling regeneration. It's the interplay between the impacts of fire disturbance and barriers to regeneration at different life stages of each species on the landscape. The USFS partnerships have been centered in Kentucky, where managers in the Cumberland Ranger District and the Supervisors Office of the DBNF worked closely with my team to identify sites for experimentation, developed goals for prescribed burning, implemented the burns, and provided financial and in-kind support as available. Notable partners in this work were former DBNF Fire Management Officer EJ Bunzendahl and Cumberland District Silviculturist Jeff Lewis, DBNF Soil Scientist Dr. Claudia Cotton, DBNF Botanist David Taylor, and many others. These partners played an essential role in sharing the findings with their networks of forest and fire managers across agencies and NGOs. This work was funded, in part, by two grants from the Joint Fire Science Program, which supported research conducted by my research group and the Bent Creek Experimental Forest, in collaboration with Dr. David Loftis and Dr. Tara Keyser. Our work together since the early 1990s was enormously impactful for its contribution to the emerging literature on fire and upland oak stands, but perhaps much more so because of the close collaboration between my research team at UK and forest managers in the DBNF. Because forest managers were invested in the research and involved at every step from experimental site selection to burn implementation, this long-term collaboration helped to shape the direction of fire management in this region. As it turned out, an active research program was a powerful vehicle for collaboration in addressing interesting ecological questions that helped to inform management decisions all while training the next generation. I couldn’t have asked for more from my career in Kentucky. And over these past 30 years, Kentucky has grown on me to the point that, as I step into retirement, which I prefer to call “the Third Act of my life,” I intend to stay here. I love the Kentucky woods and have planted firm roots here, both relational and arboreal.