Collaborative approaches to natural resource management are becoming increasingly common on public lands. Negotiating a shared vision for desired conditions is a fundamental task of collaboration and serves as a foundation for developing management objectives and monitoring strategies.

Wildfire, like many natural hazards, affects large landscapes with many landowners and the risk individual owners face depends on both individual and collective protective actions. In this study, we develop a spatially explicit game theoretic model to examine the strategic interaction between landowners’ hazard mitigation decisions on a landscape with public and private ownership.

Disturbances are integral to ecological systems and affect landscapes across a wide range of scales. The causes of disturbance, the patterns and dynamics they produce, their ecological consequences are major research topics in landscape ecology.

Future climate change and its effects on social and ecological systems present challenges for preserving valued ecosystem services, including local and regional air quality.

Wildfires can impact streamflow by modifying net precipitation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, snowmelt, and hillslope run-off pathways. Regional differences in fire trends and postwildfire streamflow responses across the conterminous United States have spurred concerns about the impact on streamflow in forests that serve as water resource areas.

Increasingly frequent “megafires” in North America's dry forests have prompted proposals to restore historical fire regimes and ecosystem resilience. Restoration efforts that reduce tree densities (eg via logging) could have collateral impacts on declining old-forest species, but whether these risks outweigh the potential effects of large, severe fires remains uncertain.

Wildfire risk in temperate forests has become a nearly intractable problem that can be characterized as a socioecological “pathology”: that is, a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States.

In fire-prone forests, self-reinforcing fire behavior may generate a mosaic of vegetation types and structures. In forests long subject to fire exclusion, such feedbacks may result in forest loss when surface and canopy fuel accumulations lead to unusually severe fires.

Fire is an important disturbance in many forest landscapes, but there is heightened concern regarding recent wildfire activity in western North America.