Research Database
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11
A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation
Year: 2024
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Untrammeling the wilderness: restoring natural conditions through the return of human-ignited fire
Year: 2024
Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes. Within many designated wilderness areas, this intentional exclusion of fire has clearly altered ecological processes and thus constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Through a framework that recognizes four orders of trammeling, we demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate change mitigation-adaptation relationships in forest management: perspectives from the fire-prone American West
Year: 2024
Minimizing negative impacts of climate change on human and natural systems requires mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to new climate conditions. Forestry provides grounds to study the relationship between these two concepts: carbon flux and storage are ecosystem services of forests, while forests are growing increasingly vulnerable to climate-driven disturbances. We examined the practice and interplay of mitigation and adaptation in the American West, which is a testbed for the conceptual balance between carbon cycling and growing climate-related risk given its abundance…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Developing reliable and valid measures for evaluating collaborative governance and adaptability: An example from the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program
Year: 2024
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. However, the majority of research in the collaborative governance and adaptability arena has relied on individual or small-n case studies. This has led to a multitude of definitions, indicators, and indices, which limits our ability to make inferences across cases and contexts. Relatedly, most research lacks formal tests of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area
Year: 2024
Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables. Fragmentation caused modelled BA changes of over ±10% in 16% of [0.5°] grid-cells. On average, more fragmentation decreased net BA globally (−1.5%), as estimated empirically. However, in recently-deforested tropical areas,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pathways for sustainable coexistence with wildfires
Year: 2024
Sustainable coexistence with wildfire requires overcoming vicious cycles that trap socio-ecological systems in maladaptive states. A carefully coordinated programme of innovation, education and governance, the ‘wildfire adaptation triad’, is essential for escaping maladaptation across national, community and individual scales.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest pollinator richness declines with distance into burned areas
Year: 2024
The effects of prescribed fire on forest pollinator communities are complex and incompletely understood. One of the least-studied questions concerns how these organisms are affected by the size, or spatial scale, of fire. We sought to address this by sampling bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), butterflies (Lepidoptera), and hover flies (Diptera: Syrphidae) at different distances along 500 m transects into forests burned every three years in the southeastern United States. We found combined pollinator richness to decline significantly with distance, being about 23.9 % lower near the centers of burn…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Hazardous wildfire smoke events can alter dawn soundscapes in dry forests of central and eastern Washington, United States
Year: 2024
As global wildfire activity increases, wildlife are facing greater exposure to hazardous smoke pollution – with unknown consequences for biodiversity. Research on the effects of smoke on wild animals is extremely limited, in part due to the inherent logistical challenges of observing how animals respond to smoke in real time. Passive acoustic monitoring may be a powerful tool to safely and effectively monitor biodiversity before, during, and after major smoke events. In this study, we used data…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Accelerated forest restoration may benefit spotted owls through landscape complementation
Year: 2024
Animals often rely on the presence of multiple, spatially segregated cover types to satisfy their ecological needs; the juxtaposition of these cover types is called landscape complementation. In ecosystems that have been homogenized because of human land use, such as fire-suppressed forests, management activities have the potential to increase the heterogeneity of cover types and, therefore, landscape complementation. We modeled changes to California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) nesting/roosting habitat, foraging habitat and habitat co-occurrence (i.e. landscape…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing fire regimes and nuanced impacts on a critically imperiled species
Year: 2024
Wildfire activity throughout western North America is increasing which can have important consequences for species persistence. Native species have evolved disturbance-adapted traits that confer resilience to natural disturbance provided disturbances operate within their historical range of variability. This resilience can erode as disturbance regimes change and begin operating outside this range. We assessed wildfire impacts during 1987–2018 on the northern spotted owl, an imperiled species with complex relationships with late and early seral forest in the Pacific Northwest, USA. We analyzed…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Before the fire: predicting burn severity and potential post-fire debris-flow hazards to conservation populations of the Colorado River Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii pleuriticus)
Year: 2024
Background: Colorado River Cutthroat Trout (CRCT; Oncorhynchus clarkii pleuriticus) conservation populations may be at risk from wildfire and post-fire debris flows hazards. Aim: To predict burn severity and potential post-fire debris flow hazard classifications to CRCT conservation populations before wildfires occur. Methods: We used remote sensing, spatial analyses, and machine learning to model 28 wildfire incidents (2016–2020) and spatially predict burn severity from pre-wildfire environmental factors to evaluate the likelihood…
Publication Type: Journal Article