Objectives. To describe demographic and social characteristics of US communities exposed to wildfire smoke.
Snags, standing dead trees, are becoming more abundant in forests as tree mortality rates continue to increase due to fire, drought, and bark beetles. Snags provide habitat for birds and small mammals, and when they fall to the ground, the resulting logs provide additional wildlife habitat and affect nutrient cycling, fuel loads, and fire behavior.
This fact sheet provides an overview of the Oregon Certified Burn Manager Program, including benefits, how it works, required and restricted actions, and links to additional resources.
This systematic literature review focused on the following questions:
1. What is Indigenous fire stewardship and how has it been represented in peer reviewed literature?
2. What are the salient social issues, debates, and concerns about IFS and its application to restoration management?
3. What aspects of IFS has literature in fire ecology and ecological restoration included?
4. What does the literature say about the policy opportunities and challenges of integrating IFS into various fire management contexts across the PNW?
The synthesis includes an annotated bibliography with 66 articles and a review of the themes present in this body of literature including social, ecological, and policy aspects of IFS. It further summarizes recommendations for land management agencies, policymakers, and researchers to support IFS integration and revitalization.
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire.
Wildland fire smoke risks are not uniformly distributed across people and places, and the most vulnerable communities are often disproportionately impacted.
In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in annual area burned in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. This rise in fire activity has prompted the need to understand how historical forest management practices affect fuel composition and emissions.
Understanding of the vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfires is limited. We used an index from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the social vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfire from 2000–2021 in California, Oregon, and Washington, which accounted for 90% of exposures in the western United States.
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction.
Wildfires are increasing in frequency, raising concerns that smoke can permeate indoor environments and expose people to chemical air contaminants. To study smoke transformations in indoor environments and evaluate mitigation strategies, we added smoke to a test house.