Preventing Human-Caused Wildfire Ignitions on Public Lands: A Review of Best Practices

Effective interventions to prevent human-caused ignitions on public lands play a critical role in social and ecological adaption to wildfire. While wildfire prevention spending generates a high return on investment, funding and capacity to support such programing within federal, state, and local land and fire management agencies remains limited. One avenue for ensuring that available funding and staffing for prevention is used to strategically maximize impact is the documentation of best practices, grounded in empirical data, that can provide indicators for effective intervention with public land users. This review informs prevention decision-making by highlighting current best practices categorized under the four key approaches to fire prevention–education, enforcement, engineering, and administration–while simultaneously revealing themes and gaps that merit further attention. We focus on interventions that can reduce accidental or negligent ignitions within the purview of land management and fire prevention professionals. We conclude with a call to modernize the field of wildfire prevention social science that promotes the diversification of study locations, design, and prevention techniques studied. Improved research and documentation surrounding the outcomes of individual or combinations of strategies and the user groups they target can help transition anecdotal assessments of prevention effectiveness into empirically informed decision-making that supports more strategic administration.