Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 109
“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
A Mixed Methods Literature Review and Framework for Decision Factors That May Influence the Utilization of Managed Wildfire on Federal Lands, USA
Year: 2021
There is increasing discussion in the academic and agency literature, as well as popular media, about the need to address the existing deficit of beneficial fire on landscapes. One approach allowable under United States federal wildland fire policy that could help address this condition is by deliberately managing wildfire with a strategy other than full suppression (hereafter referred to as ‘managed wildfire’). To improve the understanding of the managed fire decision-making process, we conducted a mixed methods review of the existing literature. This review spanned 1976 to 2013 and used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disturbance shapes the US forest governance frontier: A review and conceptual framework for understanding governance change
Year: 2021
Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s, it was becoming apparent that not only had the mix of players involved in forest management changed, but so had the playing field, as climate-driven disturbances such as wildfire and insect and disease outbreaks were becoming more extensive and severe. In this conceptual review paper, we argue that disturbance has become the most prominent driver of governance change on US national…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate and wildfire adaptation of inland Northwest US forests
Year: 2021
After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re-evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington. The case for re- evaluation is clearest where small- to large-sized, immature, fast-growing, fire-intolerant trees have filled in forests after both a long period of fire exclusion and the harvest of large, old trees. This infilling…
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
Wildfire recovery as a “hot moment” for creating fire-adapted communities
Year: 2020
Recent decades have witnessed an escalation in the social, economic, and ecological impacts of wildfires worldwide. Wildfire losses stem from the complex interplay of social and ecological forces at multiple scales, including global climate change, regional wildfire regimes altered by human activities, and locally managed wildland-urban interface (WUI) zones where homes increasingly encroach upon wildland vegetation. The coupled nature of the human-ecological system is precisely what makes reducing wildfire risks challenging. As losses from wildfire have accelerated, an emerging research and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-season fire management planning: the use of Potential Operational Delineations to prepare for wildland fire events
Year: 2020
US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives. PODs are a collaborative planning approach based on spatial analytics to identify potential wildfire control lines and assess the desirability of fire before ignition. They offer the opportunity to apply risk management principles with partners before the compressed timeframe of incident response. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire decision support tools: an exploratory study of use in the United States
Year: 2020
In the United States, many decision support tools exist to provide fire managers with weather and fire behaviour information to inform and facilitate risk-based decision-making. Relatively little is known about how managers use these tools in the field and when and how they may serve to influence decisions. To address this gap, we conducted exploratory interviews with 27 wildfire management and fire weather professionals across the United States. Results reveal that barriers to the use of decision support tools are structural and social. Specifically, fire weather and behaviour models may not…
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
Forest Service fire management and the elusiveness of change
Year: 2019
There is broad recognition that fire management in the United States must fundamentally change and depart from practices that have led to an over-emphasis on suppression and limited the presence of fire in forested ecosystems. In this paper, we look at competing problem definitions in US Forest Service policy for fire management, the presence of goal ambiguity, and how these factors can explain why changes in fire management have been elusive, despite policy change. We consider US Forest Service fire policies, performance incentives, and decision-making processes for two sides of the agency:…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Collaborations and capacities to transform fire management
Year: 2019
Wildfires bring stark attention to interactions among climate change, fire, forests, and livelihoods, prompting urgent calls for change from policy-makers and the public. Management options vary, but in many fire-adapted forests, the message from the scientific community is clear: Adapt to living with fire, reduce fuels and homes in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and strategically restore fire to ecosystems (1–4). Yet, changes to fire management outcomes have been elusive. For example, across the primarily public forestlands of the U.S. West, prescribed fires (intentionally lighted fires…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Making the Transition from Science Delivery to Knowledge Coproduction in Boundary Spanning: A Case Study of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium
Year: 2019
Boundary organizations facilitate two-way, sustained interaction and communication between research and practitioner spheres, deliver existing science, and develop new, actionable scientific information to address emerging social–ecological questions applicable to decision-making. There is an increasing emphasis on the role of boundary organizations in facilitating knowledge coproduction, which is collaborative research with end users to develop actionable scientific information for decision-making. However, a deeper understanding of how boundary organizations and knowledge coproduction work…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring the influence of local social context on strategies for achieving Fire Adapted Communities
Year: 2019
There is a growing recognition that the social diversity of communities at risk from wildland fire may necessitate divergent combinations of policies, programs and incentives that allow diverse populations to promote fire adapted communities (FACs). However, there have been few coordinated research efforts to explore the perceived utility and effectiveness of various options for FACs among residents, professionals, and local officials in disparate communities with different social contexts. The research presented here attempts to systematically explore the combination of local social factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Use of Science and Modeling by Practitioners in Landscape-Scale Management Decisions
Year: 2019
Scientific knowledge and tools have central roles in contemporary federal forest programs that promote restoration in large landscapes and across ownerships. Although we know much about the role of science in decisionmaking and ways that science can be better linked to practice, we know less about manager perspectives about science and science tools, and the perceived role of both in planning. We surveyed Forest Service resource managers in the western United States to address this knowledge gap. Respondents engaged most frequently with science via reading research publications; direct…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Risk Management and Analytics in Wildfire Response
Year: 2019
Purpose of Review The objectives of this paper are to briefly review basic risk management and analytics concepts, describe their nexus in relation to wildfire response, demonstrate real-world application of analytics to support response decisions and organizational learning, and outline an analytics strategy for the future. Recent Findings Analytics can improve decision-making and organizational performance across a variety of areas from sports to business to real-time emergency response. A lack of robust descriptive analytics on wildfire incident response effectiveness is a bottleneck for…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk reduction in the United States: Leadership staff perceptions of local fire department roles and responsibilities
Year: 2018
As wildland fires have had increasing negative impacts on a range of human values, in many parts of the United States (U.S.) and around the world, collaborative risk reduction efforts among agencies, homeowners, and fire departments are needed to improve wildfire safety and mitigate risk. Using interview data from 46 senior officers from local fire departments around the U.S., we examine how leadership staff view their departments’ roles and responsibilities in wildfire risk reduction. Overall, our findings indicate that local fire personnel are often performing a variety of mitigation tasks…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Living with Wildland Fire in America: Building New Bridges between Policy, Science, and Management
Year: 2018
In his October 26, 2017 commentary in these pages, Dr. Tom Zimmerman highlights a number of ongoing and future challenges faced by wildland fire management. To address these challenges he also identifies an important role for science and in particular management-relevant wildland fire research. Here, we first briefly elaborate on Dr. Zimmerman’s challenges and how they relate to new opportunities for the role of science. Second, we focus on three additional institutional or “cultural” barriers or divides that should be acknowledged and addressed when forging a path forward for wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Citizen Fire Academy: Curriculum Package for Facilitators and Educators
Year: 2017
The Citizen Fire Academy (CFA) program equips participants with the knowledge they need to improve fire preparedness and resiliency on their own properties and in their communities. This curriculum offers interested educators or agencies the teaching tools needed to conduct their own CFA program, including lesson plans, detailed agendas, tour ideas, and suggestions for presenting it as a hybrid course. The content is divided into six modules, with options to combine and separate the modules to fit the needs of the CFA facilitator.
Publication Type: Report
Effects of accelerated wildfire on future fire regimes and implications for the United States federal fire policy
Year: 2017
Wildland fire suppression practices in the western United States are being widely scrutinized by policymakers and scientists as costs escalate and large fires increasingly affect social and ecological values. One potential solution is to change current fire suppression tactics to intentionally increase the area burned under conditions when risks are acceptable to managers and fires can be used to achieve long-term restoration goals in fire adapted forests. We conducted experiments with the Envision landscape model to simulate increased levels of wildfire over a 50-year period on a 1.2 million…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using an agent-based model to examine forest management outcomes in a fire-prone landscape in Oregon, USA.
Year: 2017
Fire-prone landscapes present many challenges for both managers and policy makers in developing adaptive behaviors and institutions. We used a coupled human and natural systems framework and an agent-based landscape model to examine how alternative management scenarios affect fire and ecosystem services metrics in a fire-prone multiownership landscape in the eastern Cascades of Oregon. Our model incorporated existing models of vegetation succession and fire spread and information from original empirical studies of landowner decision making. Our findings indicate that alternative management…
Publication Type: Journal Article