RESUMEN
Surface fuels are the critical link between structure and function in frequently burned pine ecosystems, which are found globally (Williamson and Black, 1981; Rebertus et al., 1989; Glitzenstein et al., 1995) [[1], [2], [3]]. We bring fuels to the forefront of fire ecology through the concept of the Ecology of Fuels (Hiers et al. 2009) [4]. This concept describes a cyclic process between fuels, fire behavior, and fire effects, which ultimately affect future fuel distribution (Mitchell et al. 2009) [5]. Low-intensity surface fires are driven by the variability in fine-scale (sub-m level) fuels (Loudermilk et al. 2012) [6]. Traditional fuel measurement approaches do not capture this variability because they are over-generalized, and do not consider the fine-scale architecture of interwoven fuel types. Here, we introduce a new approach, the "3D fuels sampling protocol" that measures fuel biomass at the scale and dimensions useful for characterizing heterogeneous fuels found in low-intensity surface fire regimes. â¢Traditional fuel measurements are oversimplified, prone to sampling bias, and unrealistic for relating to fire behavior (Van Wagner, 1968; Hardy et al., 2008) [7,8].â¢We developed a novel field sampling approach to measuring 3D fuels using an adjustable rectangular prism sampling frame. This voxel sampling protocol records fuel biomass, occupied volume, and fuel types at multiple scales.â¢This method is scalable and versatile across ecosystems, and reduces sampling bias by eliminating the need for ocular estimations.