LB 22-189 - Characterizing the fire history and fire-climate relationship of Front Range Forest at Blake Lake, New Mexico.

The New Mexico State Land Office controls the Front Range Forest in Colfax County, New Mexico. The study area has had different prescriptions, including thinning and prescribed burns to assess the natural fire regime that contributes to applying management practices to increase forest health and resilience to catastrophic fires. Evaluating the forest and the fire history using advanced and relevant management techniques to the forest stand to recover the structural restoration of overgrown ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests. This research aims to apply dendrochronological methods to study site-specific forest structure, composition, and the fire regime at the P. ponderosa and dry mixed conifer stands. The objectives are to reconstruct the fire history in P. ponderosa and dry mixed conifer forests, determine and compare the relationship between historical fire occurrence and climate variability, and identify the difference in the historical fire return interval between forest types. To characterize the health and history of the forest, we sample the fire scars using the Fire scar-based method and collect tree cores in a 150 m by 50 m belt transect to sample the 20 largest trees (dbh) using the age structure method based. We extract the fire scar cross-sections to reconstruct the past fire occurrence from fire-scarred trees, logs, and stumps. A targeted approach was used to locate and collect fire scars in the small portion of the study area. The skeleton plot technique is used to inspect the annual ring-width data and date trees to identify the years in which the trees were alive. COFECHA program will be used to assess the measurement accuracy and detect the outlier ring measurement statistically of the distribution of all rings in any given year. The research is related to forest management and restoration. Fire history studies are starting to require the necessary data for analyzing the previous and current fire regimes across a broader scale. Defining the historical fire regime of the different forest stands is helpful to modern management planning in the context of climate change and fire hazards. This research will expand our knowledge of the forest structure and fire regimes in the Front Range in New Mexico. And it will focus on evaluating the health condition of current forest stands and provide information on assessing the shift in forest structure and composition. Therefore, knowing more about the natural fire regime and understanding how fire works as a natural disturbance is essential.