Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 51
Solastalgia to Soliphilia: Cultural Fire, Climate Change, and Indigenous Healing
Year: 2023
Wildly destructive fires, wind driven through unmanaged and untended lands, take lives and homes and the solace of familiar places. Ash blankets the remains, trauma takes hold, but even when the smoke clears and communities begin to heal, there is a loss beyond words. These wildfires reveal the ways many are lacking relationships with the land. Without good relationships with our environments, we worsen the health of land, plants, and animals. In this article, we foreground the experiential richness of storytelling as we build upon previous publications in Ecopsychology, further…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exceptional variability in historical fire regimes across a western Cascades landscape, Oregon, USA
Year: 2023
Detailed information about the historical range of variability in wildfire activity informs adaptation to future climate and disturbance regimes. Here, we describe one of the first annually resolved reconstructions of historical (1500–1900 ce) fire occurrence in coast Douglas-fir dominated forests of the west slope of the Cascade Range in western Oregon. Mean fire return intervals (MFRIs) across 16 sites within our study area ranged from 6 to 165 years. Variability in MFRIs was strongly associated with average maximum summer vapor pressure deficit. Fire occurred infrequently in Douglas-fir…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using culturally significant birds to guide the timing of prescribed fires in the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion
Year: 2023
Historically, wildfire and tribal burning practices played important roles in shaping ecosystems throughout the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion of northern California and southern Oregon. Over the past several decades, there has been increased interest in the application of fire for forest management through the implementation of prescribed fires within habitats that are used by a diversity of migrant and resident land birds. While many bird species may benefit from habitat enhancements associated with wildfires, cultural burning, and prescribed fire, individuals may face direct or indirect harm.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire refugia are robust across Western US forested ecoregions, 1986–2021
Year: 2023
In the Western US, area burned and fire size have increased due to the influences of climate change, long-term fire suppression leading to higher fuel loads, and increased ignitions. However, evidence is less conclusive about increases in fire severity within these growing wildfire extents. Fires burn unevenly across landscapes, leaving islands of unburned or less impacted areas, known as fire refugia. Fire refugia may enhance post-fire ecosystem function and biodiversity by providing refuge to species and functioning as seed sources after fires. In this study, we evaluated whether the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The right to burn: barriers and opportunities for Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge, significant barriers exist for re-engaging in cultural burning. Indigenous communities in Canada have unique vulnerabilities to large and high-intensity wildfires as they are predominately located in remote, forested regions and lack financial support at federal and provincial levels to mitigate wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Traditional Fire Knowledge: A Thematic Synthesis Approach
Year: 2022
Building fire-adaptive communities and fostering fire-resilient landscapes have become two of the main research strands of wildfire science that go beyond strictly biophysical viewpoints and call for the integration of complementary visions of landscapes and the communities living there, with their legacy of knowledge and subjective dimensions. Both indigenous fire management (IFM) and local fire management (LFM) are rooted in traditional fire knowledge and are among the most important contributions that rural communities can make to management partnerships. Focusing specifically on…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Transforming fire governance in British Columbia, Canada: an emerging vision for coexisting with fire
Year: 2022
The dominant command and control fire governance paradigm is proven ineffective at coping with modern wildfire challenges. In response, jurisdictions globally are calling for transformative change that will facilitate coexisting with future fires. Enacting transformative change requires attention to historical governance attributes that may enable or constrain transformation, including diverse actors, objectives, worldviews of fire, decision-making processes and power, legislation, and drivers of change. To identify potential pathways for transformative change, we systematically examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous fire management and cross-scale fire-climate relationships in the Southwest United States from 1500 to 1900 CE
Year: 2022
Prior research suggests that Indigenous fire management buffers climate influences on wildfires, but it is unclear whether these benefits accrue across geographic scales. We use a network of 4824 fire-scarred trees in Southwest United States dry forests to analyze up to 400 years of fire-climate relationships at local, landscape, and regional scales for traditional territories of three different Indigenous cultures. Comparison of fire-year and prior climate conditions for periods of intensive cultural use and less-intensive use indicates that Indigenous fire management weakened fire-climate…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The contribution of Indigenous stewardship to an historical mixed-severity fire regime in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous land stewardship and mixed-severity fire regimes both promote landscape heterogeneity, and the relationship between them is an emerging area of research. In our study, we reconstructed the historical fire regime of Ne Sextsine, a 5900-ha dry, Douglas-fir-dominated forest in the traditional territory of the T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) in British Columbia, Canada. Between 1550 and 1982 CE, we found median fire intervals of 18 years at the plot-level and 4 years at the study site-level. Ne Sextsine was characterized by an historical mixed-severity fire regime, dominated by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions Between Fire Refugia and Climate-Environment Conditions Determine Mesic Subalpine Forest Recovery After Large and Severe Wildfires
Year: 2022
Infrequent stand-replacing wildfires are characteristic of mesic and/or cool conifer forests in western North America, where forest recovery within high-severity burn patch interiors can be slow, yet successful over long temporal periods (decades to centuries). Increasing fire frequency and high-severity burn patch size, under a warming climate, however, may challenge post-fire forest recovery, promoting landscape-level shifts in forest structure, composition, and distribution of non-forest patches. Crucial to a delay and/or impediment to this shift, fire refugia (i.e., remnant seed sources)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating place-based values into ecological restoration
Year: 2022
Knowledge of how ecocultural landscapes co-evolved, how they were shaped and maintained by local people, and what processes disturbed the landscape should inform the planning, execution, and significance of restoration projects. Indigenous stewardship has resulted in legacies of diverse and productive ecocultural environments. Often, this stewardship has been guided by place-based values, which are informed by Indigenous knowledge, beliefs of equal respect for all ecosystem components, and conduct that sustains resource productivity. We propose that cultivating place-based values in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The importance of Indigenous cultural burning in forested regions of the Pacific West, USA
Year: 2021
Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and effects of cultural burning in this region within an ecosystem services framework. Much scholarly literature focuses on why various species harvested from burned areas were important historically, while tribes and recent research increasingly stress a wide range of ecological and cultural benefits…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire and climate change adaptation of western North American forests: a case for intentional management
Year: 2021
Forest landscapes across western North America (wNA) have experienced extensive changes over the last two centuries, while climatic warming has become a global reality over the last four decades. Resulting interactions between historical increases in forested area and density and recent rapid warming, increasing insect mortality, and wildfire burned areas, are now leading to substantial abrupt landscape alterations. These outcomes are forcing forest planners and managers to identify strategies that can modify future outcomes that are ecologically and/or socially undesirable. Past forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire and climate change adaptation of western North American forests: a case for intentional management
Year: 2021
We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include the following: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Where and why do conifer forests persist in refugia through multiple fire events?
Year: 2021
Changing wildfire regimes are causing rapid shifts in forests worldwide. In particular, forested landscapes that burn repeatedly in relatively quick succession may be at risk of conversion when pre-fire vegetation cannot recover between fires. Fire refugia (areas that burn less frequently or severely than the surrounding landscape) support post-fire ecosystem recovery and the persistence of vulnerable species in fire-prone landscapes. Observed and projected fire-induced forest losses highlight the need to understand where and why forests persist in refugia through multiple fires. This…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Keepers of the Flame: Supporting the Revitalization of Indigenous Cultural Burning
Year: 2021
The revitalization of cultural burning is a priority for many Native American tribes and for agencies and organizations that recognize the cultural and ecological importance of this practice. Traditional fire practitioners are working to resist the impact of settler colonialism and reestablish cultural burning to promote traditional foods and materials, exercise their sovereignty in land management, and strengthen their communities’ cultural, physical and emotional wellbeing. Despite broad support for cultural burning, the needs of practitioners are often poorly understood by non-Native…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Stewardship: Federal/Tribal Partnerships for Wildland Fire Research and Management
Year: 2021
Over millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America’s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today. This article introduces philosophical, conceptual, and operational approaches to working with American Indians through research and management partnerships in the fields of wildland fire, forestry, and fuels, with applications to climate change and forest landscape restoration strategies (Mansourian and others 2019). Of central importance are respectful collaborative relationships among the various parties (Tribes, agencies,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tribes & Climate Change
Year: 2020
Native Americans rely on tribally important ecosystem services such as traditional foods, hunting, timber production, non-timber forest resources (recreation, water), and cultural resources. Unfortunately, many of these resources may be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A research team sought to answer the question: Where and which tribally-important ecosystem services will be affected by climate change in the Pacific Northwest? They used projections from climate and vegetation models and stakeholder input to demonstrate a generalizable approach for assessing possible…
Publication Type: Web project page
Disjunct and decoupled? The persistence of a fire-sensitive conifer soecies in a historically frequent-fire landscape
Year: 2020
Local and regional species extirpations may become more common as changing climate and disturbance regimesaccelerate species’ in situ range contractions. Identifying locations that function as both climate and disturbancerefugia is critical for biodiversity conservation. Here, we investigate the persistence of a disjunct, fire-sensitiveconifer population, yellow-cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis), in the historically frequent-fire landscape of the BlueMountains in eastern Oregon, USA. We used tree rings to reconstruct multi-century fire histories, which werethen used to compare historical mean…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contributions of fire refugia to resilient ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forest landscapes
Year: 2019
Altered fire regimes can drive major and enduring compositional shifts or losses of forest ecosystems. In western North America, ponderosa pine and dry mixed‐conifer forest types appear increasingly vulnerable to uncharacteristically extensive, high‐severity wildfire. However, unburned or only lightly impacted forest stands that persist within burn mosaics—termed fire refugia—may serve as tree seed sources and promote landscape recovery. We sampled tree regeneration along gradients of fire refugia proximity and density at 686 sites within the perimeters of 12 large wildfires that occurred…
Publication Type: Journal Article