Cooperating Agencies:

• Coconino National Forest


• Rocky Mountain Research Station


• Flagstaff Fire Department

Location:

These projects are located on Coconino National Forest lands immediately surrounding the city of Flagstaff.

Date Initiated:

1996

Project Description:

Flagstaff sits at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau and is surrounded on all sides by ponderosa pine forest. Among communities in the intermountain west, Flagstaff represents one of the areas at highest risk of damage from catastrophic wildfires.

After the intense 1996 fire season, in which the Horseshoe, Hochderffer, and Bridger-Knoll fires burned over 75,000 acres of forest around Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, a collaborative group of governmental and non-governmental organizations was formed to address possible solutions to the problem of our increasingly fire-prone local forests. The Grand Canyon Forests Partnership (which in 2002 became the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership), has the following goals:

• Restore the natural ecosystem functions - within the range of natural variability - of the ponderosa pine forests in Flagstaff's urban/wildland interface.
• Manage forest fuels within the urban/wildland interface to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire.
• Research, test, develop, and demonstrate key ecological, economic, and social dimensions of restoration efforts.

Working in collaboration with the Coconino National Forest, the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, the Flagstaff Fire Department, the ERI, and others, the Partnership began designing and implementing scientifically-based fuels reduction and restoration treatments around Flagstaff. To date the Partnership has initiated numerous projects in the forest lands around Flagstaff (see map above), working outwards from the city and focusing primarily on lands to the west and south, where the worst fire danger lies due to prevailing southwest winds during fire season. Large-scale projects have been conducted and mostly completed in or around Fort Valley, Kachina Village, A-1 Mountain, Lake Mary, and Woody Mountain.

The first project implemented by the Partnership, and the one with which the ERI has done the most work to test a variety of treatment prescriptions and inform management decisions for subsequent projects, is located in the Fort Valley area, at the base of the San Francisco Peaks.

The Fort Valley area is home to two related restoration projects: the first includes three replicated experimental blocks of four units each (three different levels of thinning based on presettlement stand structure followed by prescribed fire, and a control), while the second is a set of four adjacent demonstration units comparing thinning based on presettlement stand structure to alternative thinning prescriptions developed by NAU’s silviculture lab and the Southwest Forest Alliance. Within each of the units in both projects we installed twenty monitoring plots to assess the results of the differing prescriptions on a series of ecological attributes. A variety of other studies have been implemented within these experimental units, by both ERI researchers and others, looking at autecology of native herbs and shrubs, and the effects of restoration treatments on wildlife and soil properties.

Project Status:

Units in the replicated restoration experiment were thinned between 1998 and 1999, and burned in 2000 and 2001, while the demonstration units were thinned from 2000-2001, and burned from 2003-2004. The monitoring plots were measured by ERI researchers at various stages through the implementation phase. Information learned from these restoration projects (and from related studies within the treatment area) has helped the Partnership design effective treatment prescriptions for successive projects, and has resulted in numerous scientific publications communicating the results of these studies to other researchers in the field. In the summer of 2006 we returned to the site for the 5-year post-treatment measurements.

For More Information:

• Download the 2001 (immediately post-treatment) report to the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership (949k)
• Download the 2007 report to the Forest Service on 5-year herbaceous response to the treatments (2880k)
• Contact Mike Stoddard, at

Publications:

Peer-reviewed

• Abella, S., and W.W. Covington. 2004. Monitoring an Arizona ponderosa pine restoration: sampling efficiency and multivariate analysis of understory vegetation. Restoration Ecology 12(3): 359-367.
• Elseroad, A., P.Z. Fulé, and W.W. Covington.2003. Forest road revegetation: effects of seeding and soil amendments. Ecological Restoration 21(3): 180-185.
• Fulé, P.Z., A.E.M. Waltz, W.W. Covington, and T.A. Heinlein. 2001. Measuring forest restoration effectiveness in reducing hazardous fuels. Journal of Forestry 99(11):24-29.
• Hart, S.C., P.C. Selmants, S.I. Boyle, and S.T. Overby. 2006. Carbon and nitrogen cycling in southwestern ponderosa pine forests. Forest Science 56(6): 683-693.
• Huffman, D.W. 2002. A seed chalcid (Eurytoma squamosa Bugbee) parasitizes buckbrush (Ceanothus fendleri Gray) seeds in a ponderosa pine forest of Arizona. Western North American Naturalist 62:474-478.
• Huffman, D.W. 2006. Production, losses, and germination of Ceanothus fendleri seeds in an Arizona ponderosa pine forest. Western North American Naturalist 66:365-373.
• Huffman, D.W., and M.M. Moore. 2003. Ungulate herbivory on buckbrush in an Arizona ponderosa pine forest. Journal of Range Management 56(4): 358-363.
• Huffman, D.W., and M.M. Moore.2004. Responses of Fendler ceanothus to overstory thinning, prescribed fire, and drought in an Arizona ponderosa pine forest. Forest Ecology and Management 198: 105-115.
• Kerns, B.K. 2001. Diagnostic phytoliths for a ponderosa pine-bunchgrass community near Flagstaff, Arizona. The Southwestern Naturalist 46(3) 282-294
• Kerns, B.K., M.M. Moore, and S.C. Hart. 2001. Estimating forest-grassland dynamics using soil phytolith assemblages and δ13C of soil organic matter. Ecoscience 8(4):478-488.
• Korb, J.E., N.C. Johnson, and W.W. Covington. 2003. Arbuscular mycorrhizal propagule densities respond rapidly to ponderosa pine restoration treatments. Journal of Applied Ecology 40:101-110.
• Korb, J.E., N.C. Johnson, and W.W. Covington. 2004. Slash pile burning effects on soil biotic and chemical properties and plant establishment: recommendations for amelioration. Restoration Ecology 12(1): 52-62.
• Korb, J.E., W.W. Covington, and P.Z. Fulé. 2003. Sampling techniques influence understory plant trajectories after restoration: an example from Ponderosa Pine restoration. Restoration Ecology 11(4): 504-515.
• Meyer, C.L., T.D. Sisk, and W.W. Covington. 2001. Microclimatic changes induced by ecological restoration of ponderosa pine forests in northern Arizona. Restoration Ecology 9(4):443-452.
• Meyer, C.L. and T.D. Sisk. 2001. Butterfly response to microclimatic conditions following ponderosa pine restoration. Restoration Ecology 9(4):453-461.
• Moore, M.M., W.W. Covington, and P.Z. Fulé. 1999. Evolutionary environment, reference conditions, and ecological restoration: a southwestern ponderosa pine perspective. Ecological Applications 9(4):1266-1277.

Not Peer-reviewed:

• Fulé, P.Z. 2001. Why Forests Need to Burn. Science Year Special Report 2002 (pages 42-55), World Book Publishing, Chicago, IL.
• Fulé, P.Z., C. McHugh, T.A. Heinlein, and W.W. Covington. 2001. Potential fire behavior is reduced following forest restoration treatments. Pages 28-35 in Vance, G.K., C.B. Edminster , W.W. Covington, and J.A. Blake (compilers), Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems Restoration and Conservation: Steps Toward Stewardship. Proc. RMRS-P-22. Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.
• Korb, J.E., and J.D. Springer. 2002. Technique for estimating plant biomass reduces destruction, cost, and sampling time (Arizona). Ecological Restoration 20:66-67.
• Korb, J.E., N.C. Johnson, and W.W. Covington. 2001. Effect of restoration thinning on mycorrhizal fungal propagules in a Northern Arizona ponderosa pine forest: preliminary results. USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-22. pp. 74-79.
• Korb, J.E., P.Z. Fulé, and B. Gideon. 2007. Different restoration thinning treatments affect level of soil disturbance in ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona, USA. Ecological Restoration 25(1): 43-49.