Research Database
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11
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
Living with wildfire in Ashland, Oregon: 2020 Data Report
Year: 2020
Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leading some fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solely on the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI)communities. The core intent of this project was to build a partnership between the Wildfire Research (WiRē)Team and Ashland Fire and Rescue (AFR) by leveraging existing wildfire risk data collected in March 2018and pairing it with newly collected social data to better understand Ashland,…
Publication Type: Report
Potential COVID-19 Outbreak in Fire Camp: Modeling Scenarios and Interventions
Year: 2020
The global COVID-19 pandemic will pose unique challenges to the management of wildlandfire in 2020. Fire camps may provide an ideal setting for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virusthat causes COVID-19. However, intervention strategies can help minimize disease spread andreduce the risk to the firefighting community. We developed a COVID-19 epidemic model tohighlight the risks posed by the disease during wildland fire incidents. Our model accounts forthe transient nature of the population on a wildland fire incident, which poses unique risks to themanagement of communicable diseases in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Walking through a "phoenix landscape": hiker surveys reveal nuanced perceptions of wildfire effects
Year: 2020
Public opinion of wildfire is often perceived to be negative and in support of fire suppression, even though research suggests public opinions have become more positive over the past few decades. However, most prior work on this topic has focused on homeowners in forested regions. In this study, we shift the lens to hikers in a chaparral- and oak-savannah-dominated landscape that burned at high severity in 2015. We surveyed hikers before and after their hike about their familiarity and perceptions of local fire, and wildfire in the nation at large. We found hikers were familiar with topics…
Publication Type: Journal Article
2012 National Prescribed Fire Use Survey Report
Year: 2012
Science demonstrates that low-intensity surface fires were historically a critical ecological process in as much as 60% of North American landscapes. When applied appropriately in fire-dependent ecosystems, prescribed fire maintains forest health and function, provides habitat for wildlife populations, enhances soil and water conservation, and promotes public health and safety. Prescribed fire is also often required silviculturally to develop, maintain, and protect commercial timber stands. However, its necessary use is often misunderstood, if not unknown, by the public. Societal attitudes…
Publication Type: Report
Impediments to prescribed fire across agency, landscape and manager: an example from northern California
Year: 2012
Though the need for prescribed fire is widely recognised, its use remains subject to a range of operational and social constraints. Research has focussed on identifying these constraints, yet past efforts have focussed disproportionately on single agencies and geographic regions. We examined constraints on prescribed fire by surveying a wide variety of organisations (including six state and federal agencies and several tribes, non-governmental organisations and timber companies) in northern California, a fire-prone region of the western United States. Across the region, prescribed burning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Risk and cooperation: managing hazardous fuel in mixed ownership landscapes
Year: 2012
Managing natural processes at the landscape scale to promote forest health is important, especially in the case of wildfire, where the ability of a landowner to protect his or her individual parcel is constrained by conditions on neighboring ownerships. However, management at a landscape scale is also challenging because it requires cooperation on plans and actions that cross ownership boundaries. Cooperation depends on people's beliefs and norms about reciprocity and perceptions of the risks and benefits of interacting with others. Using logistic regression tests on mail survey data and…
Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Identifying policy target groups with qualitative and quantitative methods: the case of wildfire risk on nonindustrial private forest lands
Year: 2012
This article identifies four types of nonindustrial private forest owners with different motivations for managing forestland in Oregon's fire-prone areas and different suitabilities for wildfire risk reduction policy approaches: “Commodity managers” (27% of owners, 40% of ownership area) are motivated to harvest and sell timber for income, to protect assets, and to perpetuate a family legacy of forestry. Policies that reinvigorate markets for small-diameter wood products could motivate these owners with markets that provide economic justification for reducing fuel. “Amenity managers” (21% of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Service Spending on Large Wildfires in the West
Year: 2012
The purpose of this report is to shed light on fire suppression spending as a starting point for understanding the economic impacts of large fires. In this paper, we examined Forest Service suppression spending during and after large wildfire events to explore: (1) what the Forest Service spends money on during and after a wildfire; (2) the kinds of entities and personnel that perform that work; and (3) where funds went.
Publication Type: Report
The Effect of Large Wildfires on Local Labor Markets
Year: 2012
Although fire managers, policymakers, and communities are benefiting from better understanding of suppression costs, property losses, and community impacts of large fires, no generalizable empirical research has quantified the specific effect of large wildfires on local employment and wages. As federal spending on wildfire suppression in the United States continues to grow, an understanding of the effects of wildfires on local economies will help natural resource managers, policymakers, and communities better anticipate and make management and policy decisions that support local economies.…
Publication Type: Report
Research Perspectives on the Public and Fire Management: A Synthesis of Current Social Science on Eight Essential Questions
Year: 2012
As part of a Joint Fire Science Program project, a team of social scientists reviewed existing fire social science literature to develop a targeted synthesis of scientific knowledge on the following questions: 1. What is the public’s understanding of fire’s role in the ecosystem? 2. Who are trusted sources of information about fire? 3. What are the public’s views of fuels reduction methods, and how do those views vary depending on citizens’ location in the wildland-urban interface or elsewhere? 4. What is the public’s understanding of smoke effects on human health, and what shapes the public’…
Publication Type: Report