Yosemite National Park Fire Ecology Annual Report: Calendar Year 2013

Author unknown

A summary of fire ecology activities and program information for the Park/network including fire effects plot workload, staffing, management objectives and monitoring results, and planning, fire monitoring, communications, and research. Also included are staff accomplishments/areas of focus, future program direction and other optional information (e.g. data analysis graphics or presentations, annual highlights, publications, program challenges, unique solutions to problems, collaboration, photographs of monitoring/fire activities, and suggestions on FFI). This year was the first in recorded history that Yosemite did not have a fire effects crew reading plots all summer. Funding to the park was not adequate to support a crew but did fund the Fire Ecologist for 26 pay periods and the Lead Fire Effects Monitor for 13 pay periods. Despite the lack of crew, Yosemite got a lot of backlogged projects initiated and accomplished. The Southern Sierra also had an historic fire year which claimed a lot of time from the Fire Ecologist. Three fires burned adjacent to the Park this summer that impacted park employees or burned directly into the Park. The Carstens Fire started in August by an abandoned campfire and burned ~2,500 acres near Mariposa and Bootjack. Many Yosemite employees were evacuated from their homes until the fire was controlled. The Aspen Fire burned ~ 25,000 acres on the High Sierra District of the Sierra National Forest, in the San Joaquin River valley. Lastly, the Rim Fire burned ~ 250,000 acres on the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park. The Rim Fire was the 3rd largest fire in California history and the largest fire in the Sierra Nevada. Karen Palmer, Lead Fire Effects Monitor, and her husband Zack, Assistant Captain left the park for a job in Utah in May. Karen had just completed her 13 pay periods of work through the winter and left the park with several important projects completed. A second paper on the 2010 LiDAR data acquisition was published in Remote Sensing of Environment with the Fire Ecologist as a co-author. The paper details the patterns of canopy gaps, tree clumps, and single tree arrangements in forest structure created by fire severity. Karen Palmer and Gus Smith attended the Association for Fire Ecology Congress in Portland, Oregon, and both gave several presentations to a variety of groups throughout the year. Despite the great fire assignments in the Park and in neighboring National Forests, the most exciting event of the year was fuels moisture sampling, new fuel moisture database, and upload of 20 years of Yosemite fuel moistures into the National Fuel Moisture Database. Gus took the lead on supervising fuel sampling and data entry this year and Karen took the lead on getting data ready for the National Fuel Moisture Database. Data quality this year was high and had the 2 lowest variability between samples ever. We are 90% complete with beta testing the new Access Database and will be operational in 2014.