Topic: Social and Community Impacts of Fire

Increased wildfire activity has led to renewed interest in enhancing local capacity to reduce wildfire risk in residential areas. Local fire departments (LFDs) are often the first responders to rural wildfires. However, LFDs may also struggle to address service demands in the growing wildland…

Increasing wildfire severity highlights the need for large-scale shifts in management of fire-prone landscapes. While prior research has focused on cognitive biases, social norms, and institutional disincentives that limit reform, such factors are best understood as components of feedback loops…

The increased global frequency and scale of impactful and destructive wildfires has necessitated the reimagination of recovery assistance in affected communities. Unequal experience with and access to resources to support recovery mean that organizations operating at different scales may provide…

Climate change is impacting ecosystems in dynamic ways. In order to mitigate the risks brought about by these ecosystem changes, ecosystem management, which has historically focused on preservation and preventing change, must now be much more flexible and responsive. The capacity to adapt…

Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge,…

Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire…

Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and…

Over millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America’s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today. This article introduces philosophical, conceptual, and operational approaches to working with American Indians through…

In 2019, Colorado State University entered into achallenge cost-share agreement with USFS Stateand Private Forestry to conduct independent researchon the implementation and developmentof Shared Stewardship efforts. The first phase ofour work took place in 2020, when we interviewedagency and…

The recovery requires an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to meet people where they are, assesstheir needs, and work collaboratively for the best solutions in each community. In addition, it willbe critical to listen to individuals in communities to gain a deep understanding of barriers andneeds.…