Topic: Risk Assessment and Analysis

The intensity and scale of wildfires has increased throughout the Pacific Northwest in recent decades, especially within the last decade, destroying vast amounts of valuable resources and assets. This trend is predicted to remain or even magnify due climate change, growing population, increased…

Larger and more severe wildfires are becoming more frequent and impacting different communities and human settlements. Much of the scientific literature and media on wildfires has focused on area of ecosystems burned and numbers of structures destroyed. Equally unprecedented, but often less…

Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal,…

Background Advances in fire modeling help quantify and map various components and characterizations of wildfire risk and furthermore help evaluate the ability of fuel treatments to mitigate risk. However, a need remains for guidance in designing landscape-scale fuel treatments with protection…

Background Wildland fires are fundamentally landscape phenomena, making it imperative to evaluate wildland fire strategic goals and fuel treatment effectiveness at large spatial and temporal scales. Outside of simulation models, there is limited information on how stand-level fuel treatments…

Numerous wildfire management agencies and institutions rely primarily on simple risk approaches to wildfire that focus on technical risk assessments that do not reflect the complexity of contemporary wildfire risk. This review paper argues that such insufficiently complex conceptualizations of…

In 2016, the US Forest Service initiated small-group safety discussions among members of its wildland firefighting organisation. Known as the Life First National Engagement Sessions, the discussions presented an opportunity for wildland firefighters to address systemic and cultural dysfunctions…

Studies show that effective strategies to mitigate the risk of structural damage in wildfires include defensible spaces and home hardening. Structures in the western United States are especially at risk. Several jurisdictions have adopted codes that require implementation of these strategies.…

Extreme wildfires extensively impact human health and the environment. Increasing vapour pressure deficit (VPD) has led to a chronic increase in wildfire area in the western United States, yet some regions have been more affected than others. Here we show that for the same increase in VPD,…

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing is in close proximity to or intermingled with wildland vegetation, is widespread throughout the United States, but it is unclear how this type of housing development affects public lands. We used a national dataset to examine WUI distribution and…