Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change
Roger Pielke Jr. 2007. Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change. Global Environmental Change 17 (2007) 302–310.
Roger Pielke Jr. is a Fellow of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado.
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Abstract
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change has focused debate on the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action on climate change. This refocusing has helped to move debate away from science of the climate system and on to issues of policy. However, a careful examination of the Stern Review’s treatment of the economics of extreme events in developed countries, such as floods and tropical cyclones, shows that the report is selective in its presentation of relevant impact studies and repeats a common error in impacts studies by confusing sensitivity analyses with projections of future impacts. The Stern Review’s treatment of extreme events is misleading because it overestimates the future costs of extreme weather events in developed countries by an order of magnitude. Because the Stern Report extends these findings globally, the overestimate propagates through the report’s estimate of future global losses. When extreme events are viewed more comprehensively the resulting perspective can be used to expand the scope of choice available to decision makers seeking to grapple with future disasters in the context of climate change. In particular, a more comprehensive analysis underscores the importance of adaptation in any comprehensive portfolio of responses to climate change.
Introduction: exploiting an excess of objectivity
In a provocative article titled “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse” Daniel Sarewitz explains that scientific research results in an “excess of objectivity” in political debates (Sarewitz, 2004). What he means with this phrase is that in most (if not all) cases of political conflict involving science, available research is sufficiently diverse so as to provide a robust resource for political advocates to start with a conclusion and then selectively pick and choose among existing scientific studies to buttress their case. Simply put, to cherry pick, to take the best leave the rest. …
Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY
William T. Bean and Eric W. Sanderson. 2007. Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY. Ecological Modelling 211 (2008) pp. 301–308.
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Abstract
It is unclear to what extent Native Americans in the pre-European forests of northeast North America used fire to manipulate their landscape. Conflicting historical and archaeological evidence has led authors to differing conclusions regarding the importance of fire. Ecological models provide a way to test different scenarios of historical landscape change.We applied FARSITE, a spatially explicit fire model, and linked tree mortality and successional models, to predict the landscape structure of the Harlem Plains in pre-European times under different scenarios of Native American fire use. We found that annual burning sufficed to convert the landscape to a fire-maintained grassland ecosystem, burning less often would have produced a mosaic of forest and grasslands, and even less frequent burning (on the order of once every 20 years) would not have had significant landscape level effects. These results suggest that if the Harlem Plains had been grasslands in the 16th century, they must have been intentionally created through Native American use of fire.
Introduction
The use of fire by Native Americans in northeast North America has been the subject of much debate shared among a broad group of ecologists, archaeologists and environmental historians. Some like Day (1953), Cronon (1983) and Krech (1999) believe that Native Americans used fire often to manipulate their landscape, and that these manipulations may have taken place over broad extents in the pre-European forests.
Skeptics admit that the rate of forest fires around a village might have been elevated over a background rate because Northeast Indians were using fire for cooking and pottery. However, they find little evidence that fires were widespread or intentionally set (Russell, 1983). Early settlers rarely offer first-hand accounts of fires and fewer still tell of intentional burning. These, Russell says, might be attributed to escaped fires.
Intentional burning has many potential benefits for hunting and gathering peoples: frequent fires can clear tangled vegetation, making it easier to travel through and to clear for horticulture (Lewis, 1993); fire can create vegetation mosaics that are attractive to deer and other game species, and make hunting easier (Williams, 1997); sometimes people set fires just for fun (Putz, 2003).
Of course different fire regimes have different effects on the ecology of Northeast forests. A frequent fire regime would favor a grassland with lingering oaks, a fire-tolerant genus (Swan, 1970; Abrams, 1992, 2000). Less frequent fire would lead to regenerating forests (Abrams, 1992). Understanding Native American use of fire is important for understanding the structure and function of pre-European forests.
Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour
Stephen J. Pyne. 2008. Spark and Sprawl: A World Tour. Forest History Today, Fall 2008.
Full text [here]
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Wildland-urban interface” is a dumb term for a dumb problem, and both have dominated the American fire scene for nearly twenty years. It’s a dumb term because “interface” is a pretty klutzy metaphor and because the phenomenon of competing borders it describes is more complex than that geeky term suggests. At issue is a scrambling of landscape genres beyond the traditional variants of the American pastoral. It is a mingling of the quasi-urban and the quasi-wild into something that, depending on your taste, resembles either an ecological omelet or a coniferous strip mall. That means it also stirs together urban fire services with wildland fire agencies, two cultures with no more in common than an opera house and a grove of old-growth ponderosa pine. It is an unstable alloy, a volatile compound of matter and antimatter, and it should surprise no one that it explodes with increasing regularity.
It’s a dumb problem because technical solutions exist. We know how to keep houses from burning on the scale witnessed over the past two decades. We know convincingly that combustible roofing is lethal; we have known this for maybe ten thousand years. The wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire problem (a.k.a., the interface or I-zone) thus differs from fire management in wilderness, for example, where fire practices must be grounded, if paradoxically, in cultural definitions and social choices; there is no code to ensure that the right fire happens in the right way.
That the intermix problem persists testifies to its relatively trivial standing in the larger political universe, even as construction pushes ever outward into the environmental equivalent of subprime landscapes, which from time to time then crash catastrophically. In that regard it remains on the fringe. …
The relationship of respiratory and cardiovascular hospital admissions to the southern California wildfires of 2003
R. J. Delfino, S. Brummel, J. Wu, H. Stern, B. Ostro, M. Lipsett, A. Winer, D. H. Street, L. Zhang, T. Tjoa and D. L. Gillen. 2008. The relationship of respiratory and cardiovascular hospital admissions to the southern California wildfires of 2003. Occup. Environ. Med. 2009;66;189-197.
Note: lead author is Dr. Ralph J. Delfino, Epidemiology Department, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA
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ABSTRACT
Objective: There is limited information on the public health impact of wildfires. The relationship of cardiorespiratory hospital admissions (n=40 856) to wildfirerelated particulate matter (PM2.5) during catastrophic wildfires in southern California in October 2003 was evaluated.
Methods: Zip code level PM2.5 concentrations were estimated using spatial interpolations from measured PM2.5, light extinction, meteorological conditions, and smoke information from MODIS satellite images at 250 m resolution. Generalised estimating equations for Poisson data were used to assess the relationship between daily admissions and PM2.5, adjusted for weather, fungal spores (associated with asthma), weekend, zip code-level population and sociodemographics.
Results: Associations of 2-day average PM2.5 with respiratory admissions were stronger during than before or after the fires. Average increases of 70 mg/m3 PM2.5 during heavy smoke conditions compared with PM2.5 in the pre-wildfire period were associated with 34% increases in asthma admissions. The strongest wildfire-related PM2.5 associations were for people ages 65–99 years (10.1% increase per 10 mg/m3 PM2.5, 95% CI 3.0% to 17.8%) and ages 0–4 years (8.3%, 95% CI 2.2% to 14.9%) followed by ages 20–64 years (4.1%, 95% CI 20.5% to 9.0%). There were no PM2.5–asthma associations in children ages 5–18 years, although their admission rates significantly increased after the fires. Per 10 mg/m3 wildfire-related PM2.5, acute bronchitis admissions across all ages increased by 9.6% (95% CI 1.8% to 17.9%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease admissions for ages 20–64 years by 6.9% (95% CI 0.9% to 13.1%), and pneumonia admissions for ages 5–18 years by 6.4% (95% CI 21.0% to 14.2%). Acute bronchitis and pneumonia admissions also increased after the fires. There was limited evidence of a small impact of wildfire-related PM2.5 on cardiovascular admissions.
Conclusions: Wildfire-related PM2.5 led to increased respiratory hospital admissions, especially asthma, suggesting that better preventive measures are required to reduce morbidity among vulnerable populations.
We present here the largest study to date evaluating the relationships of hospital admissions for cardiorespiratory outcomes to wildfire-associated PM2.5 using data from the catastrophic wildfires that struck southern California in the autumn of 2003. We linked PM2.5 concentrations estimated at the zip code level to a population-based dataset of hospital admissions using spatial time series analyses of data before, during and after the fires. Strong, dry winds from inland deserts fanned flames from nine distinct fires, which burned nearly three quarters of a million acres and destroyed approximately 5000 residences and outbuildings. The wildfires generated large amounts of dense smoke that covered much of urban southern California (2003 population of 20.5 million). PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations far exceeded US federal regulatory standards. The goal of the present study is to assess the impact of this large wildfire event on serious morbidity.
Rhymes With Chiricahua.
Stephen J. Pyne. 2009. Rhymes With Chiricahua. Copyright 2009 Stephen J. Pyne
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While the Chiricahua Mountains are famous for many reasons to many groups, they are rarely known for their fires. They should be. Some start from lightning, some from ranchers. Some are set by rangers, or are allowed some room to roam by them. Some are left by transients in the person of hunters, campers, and hikers. In recent years more are associated with traffic across the border with Mexico. The Chiricahuas have, at the moment, less of this than other border-hugging districts within the Coronado National Forest, but fires to distract, fires to hide, and fires abandoned by illegal border-crossers are becoming more prominent. All in all, it’s an interesting medley.
Mark Twain once observed that history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. These days it seems there is a lot of rhyming in the Chiricahuas as fires echo a fabled but assumed vanished past. This revival moves the Chiricahuas, among the most isolated of mountain ranges, a borderland setting for fire as for other matters, close to the core of contemporary thinking about managing fire in public wildlands.
The Chiricahuas –- actually a giant, deeply eroded and flank-gouged massif –- are among the southernmost of America’s Sky Islands, compact mountain ranges that both cluster and stand apart from one another, like an archipelago of volcanic isles. They are famous for their powers of geographic concentration. Their rapid ascent creates in a few thousand vertical feet what, spread horizontally, would require a few thousand miles to replicate. Here, density replaces expansiveness. One can see across a hundred miles of sky, and into half a continent of ecosystems. It is possible to traverse from desert grassland to alpine krumholtz almost instantly.
They are equally renown for their isolation, not only from the land surrounding them but from one another. The peaks array like stepping stones between the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Colorado Plateau; here, North America has pulled apart and the land has fallen between flanking subcontinental plateaus like a collapsed arch, leaving a jumble of basins and ranges as jagged mountains to poke through the rubble. The degree of geographic insularity is striking: they are mountain islands amid seas of desert and semi-arid grasslands. On some peaks relict species survive from the Pleistocene; on others, new subspecies appear. No peak has everything the others do. A Neoarctic biota mixes with a Neotropical one, black bear with jaguar, Steller’s jay with thick-beaked parrot. The Pinaleños have Engleman spruce. Mount Graham boasts a red squirrel. The Pedragosas grow Apache pine. The Peloncillos are messy with overgrowth and dense litter; the Huachucas, breezy with oak savannas. The Madrean Archipelago displays the general with the distinct: unique variations amid a common climate. They can serve as a textbook example of island biogeography. That observation extends to their fires as well. …
The Forest Health Crisis: How Did We Get In This Mess?
Charles E. Kay. 2009. The Forest Health Crisis: How Did We Get In This Mess? Mule Deer Foundation Magazine No.26:14-21.
Dr. Charles E. Kay, Ph.D. Wildlife Ecology, Utah State University, is the author/editor of Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature [here], author of Are Lightning Fires Unnatural? A Comparison of Aboriginal and Lightning Ignition Rates in the United States [here], co-author of Native American influences on the development of forest ecosystems [here], and numerous other scientific papers.
Full text with photos (click on photos for larger images):
THE WEST is ablaze! Every summer large-scale, high-intensity crown fires tear through our public lands at ever increasing and unheard of rates. Our forests are also under attack by insects and disease. According to the national media and environmental groups, climate change is the villain in the present Forest Health Crisis and increasing temperatures, lack of moisture, and abnormally high winds are to blame. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Sahara Desert, for instance, is hot, dry, and the wind blows, but the Sahara does not burn. Why? Because there are no fuels. Without fuel there is no fire. Period, end of story, and without thick forests there are no high-intensity crown fires. Might not the real problem then be that we have too many trees and too much fuel in our forests? The Canadians, for instance, have forest problems similar to ours but they do not call it a “Forest Health Crisis,” instead they call it a Forest Ingrowth Problem. The Canadians have correctly identified the issue, while we in the States have not. That is to say, the problem is too many trees and gross mismanagement by land management agencies, as well as outdated views of what is natural.
When Europeans first arrived in the West, ponderosa pine forests were open and park-like. You could ride everywhere on horseback or even in a horse and buggy, the forests were so open. On average there were only between 10 and 40 trees per acre with an understory of grasses, forbs, and shrubs. Extensive meadows were also common. In short, ideal mule dear habitat.
Photo 1 — A 1905 photograph of a ponderosa pine forest on the Kaibab in northern Arizona. It is amazing how parklike our pine forests once were. The forests were so open that you could travel virtually anywhere in a horse and buggy. Understory grasses, forbs, and shrubs were abundant. U.S. Geological Survey photo.
Photo 2 — A 1903 photograph of a ponderosa pine forest on the Coconino in northern Arizona. Note the park-like conditions and the men for scale, as well as the abundance of understory forage. Due to the openness of the forest, historically, crown fires never occurred, unlike conditions today. U.S. Forest Service photo.
Today, however, those same forests contain anywhere from 500 to 2,000 mostly smaller trees per acre. Travel on horseback is out of the question, and access by foot is even difficult. Many former meadows are now overgrown with trees. Understory forage production is approaching zero and our pine forests are becoming increasingly worthless as mule deer habitat.
The Wildland/Science Interface
Stephen J. Pyne. 2009. The Wildland/Science Interface. Copyright 2009 Stephen J. Pyne
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A long narrow road winds steeply up into thickly-wooded backcountry to an exclusive enclave of costly structures, all well beyond the periphery of settlement. It’s the formula for the worstcase scenario of the wildland/urban interface, except that this is no subprime landscape stuffed with trophy homes. It’s a telescope complex atop Mount Graham, and on the Sky Islands of Arizona the scene is repeated four times. Call it the wildland/science interface.
Fire management accepts as axiomatic that it is science-based or at least science-informed and that good science is the antidote to the toxins of politics, land development, and a Smokey-blinkered populace that doesn’t understand the natural ecology and inevitability of fire. Science is better than experience or history, and more science is better still. Science, preferably natural science, since even social science is tainted with the implied values of its human doers, is the solution. At Mount Graham, however, it is the problem. And the challenge is not simply that “science” here underwrites its own version of the WUI and opens paved roads to remote sites that complicate fire management and compromise biodiversity. The real challenge is the assumption that science stands apart from the scene it describes and from its Olympian perch can peer objectively outward and advise wisely.
The Mount Graham International Observatory suggests instead, that science’s lofty perch is not removed from land management and that science, too, has its self-interests that can influence what it sees, does, and says. Science, in brief, is not an ungrounded platform for viewing the universe of fire and recording its observations. It is sited, and that siting determines what it sees, and decisions over such sites make science and its caste of practitioners as motivated by their own values and ambitions as loggers, ranchers, real estate developers, and ATV recreationists. Science has its own dynamic apart from nature, its own presence on the land, and its own politics. The 1.83 meter primary mirror of the VATT telescope, while nominally looking out, is also a reflecting lens that looks back on its viewers.
Fire Gods and Federal Policy
Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Ph.D. 1989. Fire Gods and Federal Policy. American Forests 95(7 & 8): 14-16, 66-68.
Full text:
THE ISSUE I am presenting is based on a summary of both the letter I sent to the Interagency Fire Management Policy Review Team and testimony I presented to a joint committee of Congress in January of 1989 on the Yellowstone wildfire problem. The issue is how to restore naturalness to park and wilderness areas while preventing such wildfires from occurring again. I will concentrate on the “let nature takes its course” philosophy that led to the Yellowstone fires. I will also provide a scientifically sound and responsible approach to resource management. My purpose is to encourage the use of scientific management in national park and wilderness areas.
I was critical of the Park Service fire management program when it started. I was a ranger-naturalist at Kings Canyon National Park where the program began. At that time, I wrote a white paper that pointed out the flaws in the fire management program and the entire ranger-naturalist staff agreed with my conclusions and signed the paper. This was the first documented internal Park Service critique of the fire management program. The points that we made so many years ago are still true today, only now the problem has grown worse and it has taken on a more ominous dimension with the Yellowstone wildfires.
I have been conducting research, publishing and speaking on fire management and restoration ecology in national park and wilderness areas for twenty years. Most of my research addressed the management of giant sequoia-mixed conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada. I also investigated the effects of the Yellowstone wildfires for members of Congress. After giving so much thought to this issue over so many years, I am convinced that the real problem is the lack of clear objectives for the management of national park and wilderness areas.
The wildfires that swept through Yellowstone and surrounding wilderness areas during the summer of 1988 were not a natural event. Unlike the eruption of Mount St. Helens (which could not be controlled) the number, size and destructiveness of the Yellowstone wildfires could have been substantially reduced. The changes that took place in the vegetation mosaic and fuels in Yellowstone during nearly a century of fire suppression were preventable and reversible. The Park Service was aware of the risks of letting lightning fires burn, especially during a drought. Mr. Howard T. Nichols, a Park Service Environmental Specialist sent to help in the command center during the Yellowstone wildfires, stated in an internal memo that members of the Yellowstone staff knew “that 1988 was a very dry year” yet they “were determined to maintain the Park’s natural fire regime.” Thus the Yellowstone wildfires were caused by a combination of decades of neglect and incredibly poor judgment.
Dr. James K. Brown, a Forest Service scientist, stated in a paper he delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in January of 1989 that, assuming a prescribed burning program was initiated in 1972, “threats to villages may have been prevented or greatly reduced.” Dr. Brown also stated “a program of manager ignited prescribed burning in subalpine forests such as lodgepole pine” is “feasible.” In an earlier paper presented at the Wilderness Fire Symposium in Missoula, Montana, in 1983, Dr. Brown also said that “To manage for a natural role of fire, planned ignitions, in my view, are necessary to deal with fuels and topography that have high potential for fire to escape established boundaries.” Thus, it is likely that the wildfires would not have reached the mammoth size of 1.4 million acres if only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars used to fight the Yellowstone wildfires had been spent on scientific management that utilized prescribed burning, especially if vigorous suppression efforts had been undertaken by the Park Service when each fire began.
Two Forests Under The Big Sky: Tribal V. Federal Management
Alison Berry. 2009. Two Forests Under The Big Sky: Tribal V. Federal Management. Property and Environment Research Center Policy Series No. 45, 2009
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INTRODUCTION
Two forests: similar resources, different outcomes. In northwest Montana, the U.S. Forest Service and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) oversee adjacent forests rich in pine, larch, and Douglas-fir. Both forests are managed for multiple resources, including timber production, recreation, and habitat for fish and wildlife. Despite many similarities, their economic and environmental performances differ.
National forests in the United States are not the harvest machines they once were. At the peak in 1987, these forests yielded 13 billion board feet in timber. Today, they produce a small fraction of that output. The harvest in 2008 was 2 billion board feet (USDA Forest Service 2008a). Critics of the Forest Service’s timber sale program may argue that this is a positive change since the Forest Service lost $88 million annually from below-cost timber sales in the late 1990s (USDA Forest Service 2001a).
There was also evidence of bloated operating costs and poor stewardship of watersheds and wildlife habitat (O’ Toole 1988; Leal 1995; Fretwell 1999). While the Forest Service is staffed with trained professionals, cumbersome regulations, environmental appeals, and political meddling interfere with responsible forest management.
With the decline of timber harvests, federal forest management and funding has increasingly focused on wildfire suppression. In 1991, 13 percent of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to fire management; by 2008 that figure had risen to 45 percent (USDA Forest Service 2008b). Although the agency’s stated goal is to reduce the risk of wildfire, most fire spending is devoted to a handful of large conflagrations — not prevention or restoration to avoid costly emergencies (O’Toole 2002; Berry 2008). …
EVOLUTION OF TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY
The evolution from federal control to tribal control of reservation forests offers an interesting comparison to national forests. Resources on Indian reservations were managed by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for much of the last century. Although the BIA was put in charge ostensibly “to protect Indians and their resources from Indians” (Morishima 1997), it became clear that the agency did not always serve the best interests of the tribes. One study comparing tribal versus BIA management of forest resources on Indian reservations found that “as tribal control increases relative to BIA control, worker productivity rises, costs decline, and income improves. Even the price received for reservation logs increases” (Krepps 1992).
Causes of Post-Fire Runoff and Erosion: Water Repellency, Cover, or Soil Sealing?
Isaac J. Larsen, Lee H. MacDonald, Ethan Brown, Daniella Rough, Matthew J. Welsh, Joseph H. Pietraszek, Zamir Libohova, Juan de Dios Benavides-Solorio, Keelin Schaffrath. 2009. Causes of Post-Fire Runoff and Erosion: Water Repellency, Cover, or Soil Sealing? Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J. 73:1393-1407
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Abstract
Few studies have attempted to isolate the various factors that may cause the observed increases in peak flows and erosion after high-severity wildfires. This study evaluated the effects of burning by: (i) comparing soil water repellency, surface cover, and sediment yields from severely burned hillslopes, unburned hillslopes, and hillslopes where the surface cover was removed by raking; and (ii) conducting rainfall simulations to compare runoff , erosion, and surface sealing from two soils with varying ash cover. The fire-enhanced soil water repellency was only stronger on the burned hillslopes than the unburned hillslopes in the first summer after burning. For the first 5 yr after burning, the mean sediment yield from the burned hillslopes was 32 Mg ha-1, whereas the unburned hillslopes generated almost no sediment. Sediment yields from the raked and burned hillslopes were indistinguishable when they had comparable surface cover, rainfall erosivity, and soil water repellency values. The rainfall simulations on ash-covered plots generated only 21 to 49% as much runoff and 42 to 67% as much sediment as the plots with no ash cover. Soil thin sections showed that the bare plots rapidly developed a structural soil seal. Successive simulations quickly eroded the ash cover and increased runoff and sediment yields to the levels observed from the bare plots. The results indicate that: (i) post-fire sediment yields were primarily due to the loss of surface cover rather than fire-enhanced soil water repellency; (ii) surface cover is important because it inhibits soil sealing; and (iii) ash temporarily prevents soil sealing and reduces post-fire runoff and sediment yields.
Introduction
Wildfires increase hillslope- and watershed-scale runoff and sediment yields by several orders of magnitude (e.g., Prosser and Williams, 1998; Robichaud and Brown, 1999; Moody and Martin, 2001; Benavides-Solorio and MacDonald, 2005; Malmon et al., 2007). Land use and climate change have increased, or are projected to increase, the size and frequency of fires in many wildland environments (e.g., Mouillot et al., 2002; Hennessy et al., 2005; Westerling et al., 2006). The increase in fire risk is generating considerable concern about the potential adverse effects on water quality, aquatic habitat, and water supply systems (Rinne, 1996; Robichaud et al., 2000; Moody and Martin, 2001; Burton, 2005).
The large increases in runoff and sediment yields after high-severity fires have been attributed to several factors, including: (i) soil water repellency (DeBano, 2000; Doerr et al., 2000); (ii) loss of surface cover ( Johansen et al., 2001; Pannkuk and Robichaud, 2003); (iii) soil sealing by sediment particles (Lowdermilk, 1930; Neary et al., 1999); and (iv) soil sealing by ash particles (Mallik et al., 1984; Etiégni and Campbell, 1991). The problem is that the relative contribution of each factor to the observed increases in post-fire runoff and sediment yields is largely unknown (Shakesby et al., 2000; Letey, 2001). This lack of understanding hampers our ability to predict post-fire sediment yields and design effective post-fire rehabilitation treatments.
