We are conducting a project investigating policies that limit managers’ ability to conduct prescribed fire on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the 11 Western states.
The overall objective of this paper is to clarify areas of debate, clearly define and contrast disparate approaches, and synthesize findings that may help address vulnerability to wildfires and other natural hazards.
People living in the Pacific Northwest confrontrisks associated with environmentalhazards such as wildfire. Vulnerability towildfire hazard is commonly recognized as beingspatially distributed according to geographic conditionsthat collectively determine the probabilityof exposure.
We assessed wildfire mitigation activities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of New Mexico to identifywhich strategies are most effective. First, we modeledhow fuel treatments change wildfire behavior in 12 WUI areas.The second element of our analysis used data from over 2,000assessments of home wildfire hazard to better understand howthose hazards are distributed and change over time.
Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) is the area where human development and the natural world meet or intermingle. Read more at Fire Facts: What is? WUI.
On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research.
Wildfires and meteorological conditions influence the co-occurrence of multiple harmful air pollutants including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone. We examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of PM2.5/ ozone co-occurrences and associated population exposure in the western United States (US).
Frequent-fire forests were once heterogeneous at multiple spatial scales, which contributed to their resilience to severe fire. While many studies have characterized historical spatial patterns in frequent-fire forests, fewer studies have investigated their temporal dynamics.
Expanding the footprint of natural fire has been proposed as one potential solution to increase the pace of forest restoration programs in fire‐adapted landscapes of the western USA. However, studies that examine the long‐term socio‐ecological trade‐offs of expanding natural fire to reduce wildfire risk and create fire resilient landscapes are lacking.