Location: Water Management and Systems Research
Project Number: 3012-13660-010-040-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Mar 1, 2026
End Date: May 31, 2028
Objective:
Invasive plants change the structure and moisture content of the understory fuel bed (i.e. flammability), and this is not adequately accounted for in wildland fire fuel models used by fire managers. Some invasive plants make previously nonflammable areas flammable, while others lower flammability, potentially inhibiting prescribed fire efforts. Our objective isWe propose to directly measure the fuel bed characteristics used in wildland fire fuel models from a list of species previously identified as species of concern by stakeholders. We will use these data to determine which currently used fuel model best characterizes each species, and create new models when current models are inadequate. These models will allow us to characterize how invasions would change the existing fuelscape, and use fire simulation modeling to characterize how they would change fire regimes.
Approach:
The three primary activities of the proposed work are: 1) Directly measure fuel structural characteristics that are used in wildland fire fuel models for invasive species of concern identified by land managers across seven states in the north central US and western great plains; 2) Measure a multi-year time series of fuel moisture for a representative subset of those species to characterize the seasonality (i.e. phenology) in fuel moisture content so that managers can more accurately forecast seasonal fire risk in invaded landscapes; 3) Simulate fire activity in different seasons to characterize how and when these species change fire regimes if they invade the major vegetation types in the eastern slope of the Colorado Front Range and the grasslands of Northeast Colorado.