Topic: Risk Assessment and Analysis

Across the Western United States, human development into the wildland urban interface (WUI) is contributing to increasing wildfire damage. Given that natural disasters often cause greater harm within socio-economically vulnerable groups, research is needed to explore the potential for…

Formal requirements of wildfire mitigation on private properties are increasingly being considered as one avenue for “scaling up” wildfire management and voluntary mitigation actions to landscape scales. Likewise, enduring segments of wildfire research suggest that residents’ perceptions about…

Background

Near-term forecasts of fire danger based on predicted surface weather and fuel dryness are widely used to support the decisions of wildfire managers. The incorporation of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns into predictive models may provide additional value in…

The USDA Forest Service recently launched a Wildfire Crisis Strategy outlining objectives to safeguard communities and other values at risk by substantially increasing the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatment. This analysis quantified layered operational constraints to mechanical fuel…

Anthropogenic climate change is altering the state of worldwide fire regimes, including by increasing the number of days per year when vegetation is dry enough to burn. Indices representing the percent moisture content of dead fine fuels as derived from meteorological data have been used to…

Background

Increased use of visualizations as wildfire communication tools with public and professional audiences—particularly 3D videos and virtual or augmented reality—invites discussion of their ethical use in varied social and temporal contexts. Existing studies focus on the use of…

Background

Over the last four decades, wildfires in forests of the continental western United States have significantly increased in both size and severity after more than a century of fire suppression and exclusion. Many of these forests historically experienced frequent fire and were…

Theory predicts that effective environmental governance requires that the scales of management account for the scales of environmental processes. A good example is community wildfire protection planning. Plan boundaries that are too narrowly defined may miss sources of wildfire risk originating…

Microbes inhabiting the above- and belowground tissues of forest trees and soils play a critical role in the response of forest ecosystems to global climate change. However, generalizations about the vulnerability of the forest microbiome to climate change have been challenging due to responses…

Historically, fire has been essential in Southwestern US forests. However, a century of fire-exclusion and changing climate created forests which are more susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Forest managers use a combination of thinning and prescribed burning to reduce forest…