Cooperating Agencies:

• San Juan National Forest


• Fort Lewis College

Location:

Lower Middle Mountain, in the San Juan National Forest, Pagosa Springs Ranger District, approximately 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

Date Initiated:

2002

Description:

The ERI (along with its various partners) has numerous ongoing ecological restoration experiments in the ponderosa pine forest type around northern Arizona and western New Mexico, and has conducted several ecosystem monitoring projects in higher elevation mixed conifer, spruce-fir and bristlecone pine forests, but has not previously initiated restoration projects in any of these forest types. The current study represents a collaboration between the San Juan National Forest, Fort Lewis College, and the ERI to explore alternatives in ecological restoration of the warm-dry mixed conifer forest type, which has suffered many of the same effects from heavy resource extraction and fire exclusion as the ponderosa pine forest, including increased tree density and increased susceptibility to stand-replacing crown fire and insect outbreaks.

The study examines the ecosystem response to three different treatment prescriptions: full restoration treatment (thinning designed to replicate presettlement stand structure & composition followed by prescribed burning), burn-only treatment (no thinning), and a control (no treatment). Each treatment is replicated four times in units of approximately 33 acres each across the study area, and within each unit 20 permanent monitoring plots are used to measure ecosystem attributes such as tree structure and composition, herbaceous and shrub understory composition & cover, and surface fuel loads. The results of this project will help provide land managers and researchers with information on the response of warm-dry mixed conifer forests to various restoration alternatives, which may ultimately be applied to larger areas of this widespread forest type in southwest Colorado.

Project Status:

The full restoration units were thinned in the fall of 2004, and the site was slated for prescribed burning in the spring of 2006. Two small groups of researchers visited the site in the summer of 2005 to measure fuels on the ground before the burn, and to conduct a study investigating the effect of sampling date on herbaceous data collection. When weather conditions delayed the planned 2006 burns, ERI and Fort Lewis College researchers initiated a companion study at three sites across the southern San Juan Mountains to assess the variability of the warm-dry mixed conifer forest type, and to evaluate whether the detailed forest information collected at the Middle Mountain study site could be extrapolated to other warm-dry mixed conifer sites in the region.

As of this writing (2008) half of the Middle Mountain study site has been burned, and land managers hope to burn the other half in the spring or fall of 2008. When the prescribed burns have been completed, the ERI will send research crews to the site to re-measure all the monitoring plots and begin to assess the response of the forest to the restoration treatments.

For More Information:

• Contact Mark Daniels, at
• Project proposal (pdf file)

Publications:

• Korb, J.E. and P.Z. Fulé. 2008. Intra- and Interannual Vegetation Change: Implications for Long-Term Research. Restoration Ecology 16(1):5-11.
• Korb, J.E., M.L. Daniels, D.C. Laughlin, and P.Z. Fulé. 2007. Understory communities of warm-dry, mixed-conifer forests in southwestern Colorado. The Southwestern Naturalist 52(4):493-503.