Prescribed Burning during Winter for Maintenance of Buffelgrass

Considerations for Prescribed Burning

BOX 10.1 Prescribed Burning for Understory Restoration

Role of Prescribed Burning. Because the longleaf ecosystem evolved with and is adapted to frequent fire, every 2 to 8 years, prescribed burning is often useful for restoring understory communities to a diverse ground layer of grasses, herbs, and small shrubs. This restoration provides habitat for a number of plant and animal species that are restricted to or found mostly in longleaf pine commun...

Prescribed Mosaic Burning in California Chaparral

In fire-prone ecosystems, knowledge of previous fire history and long-term fire regimes is essential to the establishment of ecologically sound fire management. In the Californian chaparral, fire regimes are determined by the rate of fuel accumulation and previous fire history. The evolution of patch mosaics created by fire is a non-random and self-organizing process because the occurrence of f...

Winter Maintenance and Cycleways

Increasing cycling as a means of personal travel could generate environmental benefits if associated with a corresponding decrease in car-based transport. In seeking to promote cycling in wintertime, it is desirable to understand how important the road surface condition is compared to other factors in people’s decision to cycle or not. In this thesis, the possibility of increasing the number of...

Pilot Testing a Naturalistic Driving Study to Investigate Winter Maintenance Operator Fatigue during Winter Emergencies

Although numerous research studies have investigated the effects of fatigue in commercial motor vehicle drivers, research with winter maintenance (WM) drivers is sparse. This study pilot-tested the feasibility of evaluating WM operator fatigue during winter emergencies using naturalistic driving data. Four WM operators participated in the study and drove two instrumented snow plows for three co...