Fire Effects Monitoring

Park staff collect information on the effects of fire and fire management activities on fuel loads, plant populations, tree regeneration, and exotic species. How a plant community responds to fire depends on fire severity and environmental gradients such as elevation, soil properties, slope, and aspect. Long-term trends in plant community composition are monitored at 11 post-fire plots distributed widely across the park that were set up from 1977 to 1989 and have been resampled every few years to collect information on surface fuel loading, ground-layer vegetation, and tree populations. Another 25 plots have been established since 1998 to provide comparative pre- and post-burn data in hazard fuel reduction areas, in proposed prescribed fire sites, and units, but most in advance of naturally ignited fires.