Associate Professor Brian Harvey and the UW Harvey Lab have three new exciting grant-backed projects in the works. The lab will be looking at how climate-adaptive forest management can foster resilience to wildfire. Two of these grants are through the USFS Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill under the wildfire crisis strategy. The third is through the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Associate Professor Harvey shared more about the research below.

Evaluating and modeling dry forest restoration and fuel treatment effects through time and across stand successional stages

In this project under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – Wildfire Crisis Strategy, Harvey and his lab will be working with USFS PIs Dave Peterson and Kathryn Ireland and other collaborators to combine insights from long-term field data and simulation modeling to support planning, implementation, and maintenance of forest restoration and fuel reduction treatments on Wildfire Crisis Strategy priority landscapes in the Eastern Cascades. Specifically, the team is developing climate-adaptive management scenarios in landscape simulation models to provide information about treatment effectiveness, treatment longevity, and long-term ecological responses under a range of climate and fire scenarios.

Interacting influence of forest management and fire on forest resilience, carbon, fish, and wildlife habitat in the Mt. Hood and Willamette National Forests, Oregon, USA

In a second project under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – Wildfire Crisis Strategy, Harvey and his lab will be working with USFS PI Dave Bell and other collaborators to develop an improved understanding of how forest age, species composition, and forest management influence future forest resilience to fire in Wildfire Crisis Strategy priority landscapes in the Western Cascades. Specifically, our team is paramaterizing the landscape simulation model iLand to test how different climate-adaptive forest management strategies can foster resilience under a range of climate, fire, and management scenarios.

Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (WFFRC)

The Harvey Lab is one of the core science teams in the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative (WFFRC) funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The main goal of WFFRC is to accelerate fire science and fire ecology to enhance forest resilience and adaptive management and policy in the western US by leveraging fieldwork, remote sensing, and simulation models across a broad collaborative team at multiple institutions and stakeholders. Harvey’s lab team is leading the remote sensing and landscape analyses of burn severity across western US forests and connecting with fire behavior modeling to better understand how fire regimes are changing and how management can foster resilience to fire.