Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 138
Role of Forensic Anthropology in the Search and Recovery of Fatal Wildland Fire Victims
Year: 2025
The search and recovery process of fatal fire victims is one of the greatest challenges in forensic anthropology, especially in large-scale wildland fire disasters. Burned human remains can exhibit significant variation in their degree of preservation depending on the temperature of the fire, the length of exposure to the heat source, and intrinsic characteristics of the victim (e.g., body size, age, and bone density). Wildland fire victims typically exhibit characteristics of the final stages of burning (i.e., nearly complete to complete calcination). The search for burned human remains is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire delayed tree mortality in mesic coniferous forests reduces fire refugia and seed sources
Year: 2025
Context: Ecological functions provided by fire refugia are critical for supporting conifer forest resiliency under increased fire activity across the western United States. The spatial distribution and persistence of fire refugia over time are uncertain as fire-injured trees continue to die over subsequent years post-fire.Objectives: We examined how post-fire delayed tree mortality affects the spatial distribution and attributes of fire refugia at patch and landscape scales following high-severity wildfires.Methods: To explore changes in fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governance of Indigenous data in open earth systems science
Year: 2025
In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights? The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), convened to address this question and envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research. Using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) as an example, the EDRWG recommends actions, applicable across all phases of the data lifecycle, that recognize the sovereign rights of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High fire hazard Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) residences in California lack voluntary and mandated wildfire risk mitigation compliance in Home Ignition Zones
Year: 2025
Wildfire structure losses are increasing globally and particularly in California, USA. Losses can be mitigated in part by changes to the Home Ignition Zone (HIZ), including both home hardening and defensible space. In the United States, there are local, nation-wide, and industry-based home mitigation standards that are enforced or recommended. We explore the standards implementation (California code and two voluntary standards) at 176 participating residences in three Santa Cruz Mountains and two Sierra Nevada Mountains sites. Overall most residences had little compulsory or recommended…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing wildland fire suppression effectiveness with infrared imaging on experimental fires
Year: 2025
Background: Suppression effectiveness is often evaluated by measuring the extent to which it slows fire spread and reduces fireline intensity. Although studies have used infrared (IR) imaging methods to explore suppression effectiveness, most do not measure or assess the influence of water application on energy release.Aims: This preliminary analysis uses IR imagery to quantify the impact of suppression on fire behaviour and the reduction in energy released from a flaming fire.Methods: We conducted a series of small-scale experimental burns…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burning from the ground up: the structure and impact of Prescribed Burn Associations in the United States
Year: 2025
Background: To combat losses and threats from fire exclusion and extreme wildfire events, communities in the United States are increasingly self-organizing through locally led Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) to plan and implement prescribed burns on private lands.Aim: Our study aimed to document the expansion of PBAs and provide insight into their structure, function, and impacts.Methods: Leaders from 135 known PBAs across the United States were invited to participate in an online survey.Key results: Survey results demonstrate a widespread emergence of PBAs in the United States,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Household needs among wildfire survivors in the 2017 Northern California wildfires
Year: 2025
Wildfires are impacting communities globally, with California wildfires often breaking records of size and destructiveness. Knowing how communities are affected by these wildfires is vital to understanding recovery. We sought to identify impacted communities' post-wildfire needs and characterize how those needs change over time. The WHAT-Now study deployed a survey that was made publicly available for communities affected by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires or the accompanying smoke at beginning approximately four months post-fire with the vast majority completed by nine months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA): A Machine Learning Based Fire Spread Prediction Model for Air Quality Forecasting Application
Year: 2025
Fire activities introduce hazardous impacts on the environment and public health by emitting various chemical species into the atmosphere. Most operational air quality forecast (AQF) models estimate smoke emissions based on the latest available satellite fire products, which may not represent real-time fire behaviors without considering fire spread. Hence, a novel machine learning (ML) based fire spread forecast model, the Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA), is developed for AQF model applications. FIRA aims to improve the performance of AQF models by providing realistic, dynamic fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Roof renewal disparities widen the equity gap in residential wildfire protection
Year: 2025
Wildfires are having disproportionate impacts on U.S. households. Notably, in California, over half of wildfire-destroyed homes (54%) are in low-income areas. We investigate the relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire community preparedness using building permits from 16 counties in California with 2.9 million buildings (2013–2021) and the U.S. government’s designation of disadvantaged communities (DACs), which classifies a census tract as a DAC if it meets a threshold for certain burdens, such as climate, environmental, and socio-economic. Homes located in DACs are 29% more…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion quadruple the likelihood of extreme-impact wildfires in California
Year: 2025
Previous research has examined individual factors contributing to wildfire risk, but the compounding effects of these factors remain underexplored. Here, we introduce the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI)” to quantify the compounding effects of fire-weather intensification and anthropogenic factors—including ignitions and human settlement into wildland—on wildfire risk. While climatic trends increased the frequency of high-risk fire-weather by 2.5-fold, the combination of this trend with wildland-urban interface expansion led to a 4.1-fold increase in the frequency of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Preventing Human-Caused Wildfire Ignitions on Public Lands: A Review of Best Practices
Year: 2025
Effective interventions to prevent human-caused ignitions on public lands play a critical role in social and ecological adaption to wildfire. While wildfire prevention spending generates a high return on investment, funding and capacity to support such programing within federal, state, and local land and fire management agencies remains limited. One avenue for ensuring that available funding and staffing for prevention is used to strategically maximize impact is the documentation of best practices, grounded in empirical data, that can provide indicators for effective intervention with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling the probability of bark beetle-caused tree mortality as a function of watershed-scale host species presence and basal area
Year: 2025
In recent decades, bark beetle outbreaks have caused mass tree mortality in western US forests, which has led to altered wildfire characteristics, hydrological processes, and forest carbon dynamics. Understanding spatial variability in forest susceptibility to bark beetle outbreaks in the western US could inform strategic forest management to reduce wildfire risk, manage forest carbon, and plan for altered hydrology. The susceptibility of a forest stand to mortality by bark beetles depends on the availability and characteristics of trees of the host tree species. For multiple bark beetle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Carbon emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires
Year: 2024
The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations. We find that the magnitude of the carbon emissions is 647 TgC (570–727 TgC), comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the USA releasing more carbon per year. We find that widespread hot–dry weather was a principal…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Improving social resilience to forest fire from community perspective
Year: 2024
Recently, terms like social and community resilience have provided new ideas in reducing disaster risks especially in forest fire. However, a comprehensive and in-depth review of community social resilience concerning forest fires is lacking. There is little research investigate whether certain social or community resilience factors can initiate forest fires or whether forest fire prevention positively be influenced by them. To fill this gap, this paper aims to identify and discuss the factors influencing the occurrence of forest fires in the scope of community social resilience. It also…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Molecular shifts in dissolved organic matter along a burn severity continuum for common land cover types in the Pacific Northwest, USA
Year: 2024
Increasing wildfire severity is of growing concern in the western United States, with consequences for the production, composition, and mobilization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) from terrestrial to aquatic systems. Our current understanding of wildfire impacted DOM (often termed pyrogenic DOM) composition is largely built from temperature-based studies that can be difficult to extrapolate to field conditions, which are often defined by ‘burn severity’, or the post-wildfire impact observed at a site. Thus, burn severity can encapsulate a broader range of fire and environmental conditions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial and temporal analysis of vulnerability disparity of minorities to wildfires in California
Year: 2024
Wildfires typically have devastating impacts on communities, both in urban and rural areas, resulting in property loss, psychological distress, physical injuries, and loss of life. A notable gap in the literature is the spatial and temporal disproportionate impact of wildfires on underrepresented communities. This lack of attention is concerning, as these underrepresented populations are likely to be more vulnerable to the devastating consequences of wildfire disasters, exacerbating pre-existing social, economic, and environmental disparities. This study aims to address this gap by conducting…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Remote sensing applications for prescribed burn research
Year: 2024
Prescribed burning is a key management strategy within fire-adapted systems, and improved monitoring approaches are needed to evaluate its effectiveness in achieving social-ecological outcomes. Remote sensing provides opportunities to analyse the impacts of prescribed burning, yet a comprehensive understanding of the applications of remote sensing for prescribed burn research is lacking. We conduct a literature review of 120 peer-reviewed publications to synthesise the research aims, methodologies, limitations and future directions of remote sensing for the analysis of prescribed fire.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring spatial heterogeneity in synergistic effects of compound climate hazards: Extreme heat and wildfire smoke on cardiorespiratory hospitalizations in California
Year: 2024
Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are increasingly co-occurring in the context of climate change, especially in California. Extreme heat and wildfire smoke may have synergistic effects on population health that vary over space. We leveraged high-resolution satellite and monitoring data to quantify spatially varying compound exposures to extreme heat and wildfire smoke in California (2006–2019) at ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) level. We found synergistic effects between extreme heat and wildfire smoke on daily cardiorespiratory hospitalizations at the state level. We also found spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020)
Year: 2024
The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast. Using satellite data, we analyzed the daily growth rates of more than 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020 across the contiguous US. Nearly half of the ecoregions experienced destructive fast fires that grew more than 1620 hectares in 1 day. These fires accounted for 78% of structures destroyed and 61% of suppression costs ($18.9 billion). From 2001 to 2020, the average peak daily growth rate for these fires more than doubled (+249% relative to 2001) in the Western US. Nearly 3 million structures were within 4 kilometers of a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing Conservation Readiness: The Where, Who, and How of Strategic Conservation in the Sagebrush Biome
Year: 2024
The sagebrush biome is rapidly deteriorating largely due to the ecosystem threats of conifer expansion, more frequent and larger wildfires, and proliferation of invasive annual grasses. Reversing the impacts of these threats is a formidable challenge. The Sagebrush Conservation Design (SCD) emphasized that limited conservation resources should first be used to maintain Core Sagebrush Areas (CSA), and then to grow such areas where possible. The SCD heightens the ecological importance of maintaining and strategically growing CSAs. However, the fact that these areas have been identified does not…
Publication Type: Journal Article