Researchers have sought to understand why wildland urban interface areas continue to expand in the United States despite increasing riskand loss to those areas.
In recent decades, there has been an increased emphasis on, and application of, collaborative and adaptive forms of environmental governance as a means to address complex social-ecological problems that cannot be achieved alone and support sustainable resource management.
Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls.
Major power outages have risen over the last two decades, largely due to more extreme weather conditions. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the distribution of power outages and its relationship to social vulnerability and co-occurring hazards.
Background: Following a century of fire suppression in western North America, managers use forest restoration treatments to reduce fuel loads and reintroduce key processes like fire. However, annual area burned by wildfire frequently outpaces the application of restoration treatments.
Pre-fire mitigation efforts that include the installation and maintenance of fuel breaks are integral to wildfire suppression in Southern California. Fuel breaks alter fire behavior and assist in fire suppression at strategic locations on the landscape. However, the combined effectiveness of fuel breaks and wildfire suppression is not well studied.
During drought, resource managers want to know when the drought will end to make informed management decisions. However, as anthropogenic climate change has intensified drought conditions, we hypothesize it has affected drought recovery.
Wildfires in the southwestern United States are increasingly frequent and severe, but whether these trends exceed historical norms remains contested. Here we combine dendroecological records, satellite-derived burn severity, and field measured tree mortality to compare historical (1700-1880) and contemporary (1985-2020) fire regimes at tree-ring fire-scar sites in Arizona and New Mexico.
Large-scale wildfires are becoming increasingly common in the wet forests of the Pacific Northwest (USA), with predicted increases in fire prevalence under future climate scenarios. Wildfires can alter streamflow response to precipitation and mobilize water quality constituents, which pose a risk to aquatic ecosystems and downstream drinking water treatment.
The Yurok Tribe, along with other tribal communities in northwest California, non-profit organizations, universities, and governmental agencies are working to restore forests and woodlands to be more resilient to wildfires, drought, pests and diseases.