Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Desert Southwest CESU

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The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner to support a collaborative research effort with USGS scientists to determine landscape-scale histories of fire and climate relationships in forests of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico. A century of fire exclusion and increasing temperatures are driving increased fire sizes and severity in the western United States. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains form the southern terminus of the Rocky Mountains, with the Santa Fe area containing a unique combination of wildland-urban interface, wilderness, and municipal water supplies superimposed on a ~6000-foot elevational gradient of vegetation types and diverse fire regimes. Fire history case studies in and near the area suggest that frequent low-severity fires characterized the lower and mid-elevation forests, and that such forests have thickened considerably with fire suppression in the past century+, thereby becoming more susceptible to high-severity crown fires. In contrast, there is evidence that extensive high-severity fire historically occurred in the higher elevation forests; if similarly severe fires occurred today in the municipal watershed or even more broadly in this landscape, they would be devastating for the municipal water supply of the city of Santa Fe and put life and property at risk in the expanding wildland-urban interface. Recent smaller fires in the area have raised questions about the potential for fire spread across watersheds, vegetation types and different topographic settings. However, there is little information available on the landscape-scale connectivity of fire among fire regimes and watersheds in this area (e.g., the likelihood that an ignition in an adjacent watershed will spread to the Santa Fe Municipal watershed), needed to better inform fire hazard reduction, watershed protection planning, and climate change vulnerability assessments of montane forests in this region.

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