Public opinion of wildfire is often perceived to be negative and in support of fire suppression, even though research suggests public opinions have become more positive over the past few decades. However, most prior work on this topic has focused on homeowners in forested regions.
Recent decades have witnessed an escalation in the social, economic, and ecological impacts of wildfires worldwide.
Wildfire losses are increasing across the United States, and yet land use planning to reduce wildfire risk is not federally mandated and is rarely used by local jurisdictions.
Wildfires pose a serious threat to life in many countries. For police, fire and emergency services authorities in most jurisdictions in North America and Australia evacuation is now the option that is preferred overwhelmingly. Wildfire evacuation modeling can assist authorities in planning evacuation responses to future threats.
The research presented in this article responds to the deficit described above by exploring the ways that interaction between residents, land managers, fire professionals, and government officials’ influences local approaches to wildfire management.
Modern works by highly skilled narrative authors and artists have become increasingly useful for telling the story of wildland fire in the United States.
Fire adaptation is about more than pre-fire work. It’s also about considering the needs of a community and the land post-fire. In Washington State, the last several fire seasons have given communities lots of opportunities to learn about post-fire recovery.
As climate change has contributed to longer fire seasons and populations living in fire-prone ecosystems increase, wildfires have begun to affect a growing number of people. As a result, interest in understanding the wildfire evacuation decision process has increased.
As approaches to ecological restoration become increasingly large scale and collaborative, there is a need to better understand social aspects of restoration and how they influence land management. In this article, we examine social perspectives that influence the determination of ecological reference conditions in restoration.
Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth's surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses.