Measuring effectiveness of three postfire hillslope erosion barrier treatments, western Montana, USA

Nunes JP, Doerr SH, Sheridan G, Santin C, Emleko MB, Silins U, Robichaud PR, Elliot WJ. 2018. Assessing water contamination risk from vegetation fires: Challenges, opportunities and a framework for progress.. Hydrological Processes 2018;687-694. DOI: 10.1002/hyp.11434.

Keywords: erosion, sediment transport, water supplies, modeling

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Abstract: Water crises—defined as significant declines in water quality and quantity—top the global risks list compiled by the World Economic Forum (2015) that have the greatest potential impacts on society. Vegetation fires are amongst the most hydrologically significant landscape disturbances (Ebel & Mirus, 2014) and affect ~4% of the global vegetated land surface annually (Giglio, Randerson, & van der Werf, 2013). A substantial body of hydrological research exists on fire impacts on soil-, hillslope- and, to a lesser extent, catchment-scale processes with a focus on infiltration, runoff, erosion, and water yield (Moody, Shakesby, Robichaud, Cannon, & Martin, 2013; Shakesby & Doerr, 2006; Shakesby, Moody, Martin, & Robichaud, 2016). However, despite the concerns highlighted above, research has only recently focused on linkages between on-site and downstream impacts of fire on water quality. Despite their economic and environmental significance, it is still difficult to sufficiently predict the probability and magnitude of post-fire contaminant exports to enable (a) reliable water contamination risk assessments in fire-prone catchments and (b) support effective mitigation strategies (Shakesby, 2011; Shakesby et al., 2016; Verkaik et al., 2013). This commentary introduces such a framework within which we highlight (a) the dominant limitations to our capacity to evaluate post-fire water contamination risk and (b) recent advances towards addressing them across a range of post-fire environments. This framework embodies the science required to broaden the scope and maximize the utility of such investigations, whilst enabling meaningful comparison between studies and addressing site-specific and end user-focused priorities.

Moscow FSL publication no. 2018a