Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 80
Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics
Year: 2024
Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls. This delineation revealed that rapidly increasing forest fire emissions in extratropical pyromes, linked to climate change, offset declining emissions in tropical pyromes during 2001 to 2023. Annual emissions tripled in one extratropical pyrome due to…
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
Application of the wildland fire emissions inventory system to estimate fire emissions on forest lands of the United States
Year: 2024
BackgroundForests are significant terrestrial biomes for carbon storage, and annual carbon accumulation of forest biomass contributes offsets affecting net greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The immediate loss of stored carbon through fire on forest lands reduces the annual offsets provided by forests. As such, the United States reporting includes annual estimates of direct fire emissions in conjunction with the overall forest stock and change estimates as a part of national greenhouse gas inventories within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Forest fire emissions…
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
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
Generating fuel consumption maps on prescribed fire experiments from airborne laser scanning
Year: 2024
Background. Characterisation of fuel consumption provides critical insights into fire behaviour, effects, and emissions. Stand-replacing prescribed fire experiments in central Utah offered an opportunity to generate consumption estimates in coordination with other research efforts. Aims. We sought to generate fuel consumption maps using pre- and post-fire airborne laser scanning (ALS) and ground measurements and to test the spatial transferability of the ALSderived fuel models. Methods. Using random forest (RF), we empirically modelled fuel load and estimated consumption from pre-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social science to advance wildfire adaptation in the southwestern United States: a review and future research directions
Year: 2023
Background. Social science that seeks to advance wildfire adaptation in the southwestern US states of Arizona and New Mexico remains underdeveloped in comparison with other regions in the USA. Aim. To identify key themes in the existing social science literature on wildfire in the Southwest and to determine future research needs that can inform more strategic adaptation across scales and contexts. Methods. This article presents an in-depth literature review, organising findings using the Fire Adapted Communities Framework. Key results. Research on social aspects of wildfire in the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool: Facilitating Social Learning and a Science of Practice
Year: 2023
Wildfire science, policy, and practice lack systematic means for “tailoring” fire adaptation practices to socially diverse human populations and in ways that aggregate existing lessons. This article outlines the development and initial operationalization of the Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool, an inductive set of processes that help facilitate dialogue about needs and priorities for wildfire adaptation strategies across ownership boundaries or partners. We outline the stages and considerations organized by the tool, including how its components build from decades of social science and…
Communicating about Fire, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social drivers of vulnerability to wildfire disasters: A review of the literature
Year: 2023
The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population’s or…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The interactional approach to adaptive capacity: Researching adaptation in socially diverse, wildfire prone communities
Year: 2022
This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of advancements developed while extending the theory to promote collective action for wildfire. Extensions of Wilkinson’s work include organizing a range of adaptive capacity characteristics that help document differential community capacity for wildfire adaptation, introduction of “community archetypes”…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community Engagement With Proactive Wildfire Management in British Columbia, Canada: Perceptions, Preferences, and Barriers to Action
Year: 2022
Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. These growing impacts have prompted a paradigm shift toward proactive wildfire management that prioritizes prevention and preparedness instead of response. Despite this shift, many communities remain unprepared for wildfires in the WUI due to diverse individual and social-political factors influencing engagement with proactive management approaches. The catastrophic fire seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2021 in British Columbia (BC), Canada, highlighted just how vulnerable communities continue to be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cultivating Collaborative Resilience to Social and Ecological Change: An Assessment of Adaptive Capacity, Actions, and Barriers Among Collaborative Forest Restoration Groups in the United States
Year: 2022
Collaboration is increasingly emphasized as a tool to realize national-level policy goals in public lands management. Yet, collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are nested within traditional bureaucracies and are affected by internal and external disruptions. The extent to which CGRs adapt and remain resilient to these disruptions remains under-explored. Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other CGRs. We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing co-occurrence of fine particulate matter and ground-level ozone extremes in the western United States
Year: 2022
Wildfires and meteorological conditions influence the co-occurrence of multiple harmful air pollutants including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone. We examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of PM2.5/ ozone co-occurrences and associated population exposure in the western United States (US). The frequency, spatial extent, and temporal persistence of extreme PM2.5/ozone co-occurrences have increased significantly between 2001 and 2020, increasing annual population exposure to multiple harmful air pollutants by ~25 million person-days/year. Using a clustering methodology…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governing wildfires: toward a systematic analytical framework
Year: 2022
Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Priorities and Effectiveness in Wildfire Management: Evidence from Fire Spread in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Costs of fighting wildfires have increased substantially over the past several decades. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of wildfire suppression or how wildfire incident managers prioritize resources threatened within a wildfire incident. We investigate the determinants of wildfire suppression effort using a novel empirical strategy comparing over 1,400 historical fire perimeters to the spatial distribution of assets at risk. We find that fires are more likely to stop spreading as they approach homes, particularly when homes are of greater value. This effect persists…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governing ecosystem adaptation: An investigation of adaptive capacity within environmental governance networks
Year: 2022
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 management approaches to current and future climate conditions is fundamentally a function of access to resources and social capital, both of which are considerably influenced by underlying socio-political conditions. While a growing body of research addresses the adaptive capacity of individuals,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Communicating with the public about wildland fire preparation, response, and recovery
Year: 2021
This literature review synthesizes empirical research about wildland fire communication to provide practitioners, such as land managers, public health and safety officials, community groups, and others working with the public, evidence-based recommendations for communication work. Key findings demonstrate that it is important to recognize communication as a context-specific and dynamic process, not a linear pathway or prescription, or one-size-fits-all approach. We found that practitioners engaging in this work may be most effective when they get to know their diverse publics, engage in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Restoration and Fuels Reduction: Convergent or Divergent?
Year: 2021
For over 20 years, forest fuel reduction has been the dominant management action in western US forests. These same actions have also been associated with the restoration of highly altered frequent-fire forests. Perhaps the vital element in the compatibility of these treatments is that both need to incorporate the salient characteristics that frequent fire produced—variability in vegetation structure and composition across landscapes and the inability to support large patches of high-severity fire. These characteristics can be achieved with both fire and mechanical treatments. The possible key…
Publication Type: Journal Article
“Us versus Them;” Local Social Fragmentation and Its Potential Effects on Building Pathways to Adapting to Wildfire
Year: 2021
As the need for wildfire adaptation for human populations in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) intensifies in the face of changes that have increased the number of wildfires that exceed 100 thousand acres, it is becoming more important to come to a better understanding of social complexity on the WUI landscape. It is just as important to further our understanding of the social characteristics of the individual human settlements that inhabit that landscape and attempt to craft strategies to improve wildfire adaptation that are commensurate with local values, management preferences, and local…
Publication Type: Journal Article
After the fire: Perceptions of land use planning to reduce wildfire risk in eight communities across the United States
Year: 2020
Wildfire losses are increasing across the United States, and yet land use planning to reduce wildfire risk is not federally mandated and is rarely used by local jurisdictions. We examined local government staff and leaders’ perceptions of land use planning and regulations to reduce wildfire risk, in a range of communities, after wildfire risk had been made evident with the loss of homes due to wildfire. Although policy after fire was largely unchanged we found local leaders had devoted substantial attention to the subject of land use planning. Communities were dealing with a number of…
Publication Type: Journal Article