Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 283
Valuing co-benefits of forest fuels treatment for reducing wildfire risk in California's Sierra Nevada
Year: 2025
As wildfires in the western United States grow in frequency and severity, forest fuels treatment has been increasingly recognized as essential for enhancing forest resilience and mitigating wildfire risks. However, the economic valuation of the treatment's co-benefits remains underexplored, limiting integration into financial and policy decision making. Using highly forested land in California's Sierra Nevada as study areas, this study provides a methodology to quantify the economic benefits of forest fuels treatment in mitigating wildfire-induced losses across multiple ecosystem services,…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Canadian forests are more conducive to high-severity fires in recent decades
Year: 2025
Canada has experienced more-intense and longer fire seasons with more-frequent uncontrollable wildfires over the past decades. However, the effect of these changes remains unknown. This study identifies driving forces of burn severity and estimates its spatiotemporal variations in Canadian forests. Our results show that fuel aridity was the most influential driver of burn severity, summer months were more prone to severe burning, and the northern areas were most influenced by the changing climate. About 6% (0.54 to 14.64%) of the modeled areas show significant increases in the number of days…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US Forests
Year: 2025
Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities. Here, we quantified area burned and area burned severely in western US forests from 1985 to 2022 and evaluated trends through time. We also assessed key relationships between area burned, extent and proportion burned severely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatiotemporal Synchrony of Climate and Fire Occurrence Across North American Forests (1750–1880)
Year: 2025
Aim: Increasing aridity has driven widespread synchronous fire occurrence in recent decades across North America. The lack of historical (pre-1880) fire records limits our ability to understand long-term continental fire-climate dynamics. The goal of this study is to use tree-ring reconstructions to determine the relationships between spatiotemporal patterns in historical climate and widespread fire occurrence in North American forests, and whether they are stable through time. This information will address a major knowledge gap required to inform projections of future fire.Location: North…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing fire regimes in the Great Basin USA
Year: 2025
Wildfire is a natural disturbance in landscapes of the Western United States, but the effects and extents of fire are changing. Differences between historical and contemporary fire regimes can help identify reasons for observed changes in landscape composition. People living and working in the Great Basin, USA, are observing altered fire conditions, but spatial information about the degree and direction of change and departure from historical fire regimes is lacking. This study estimates how fire regimes have changed in the major Great Basin vegetation types over the past 60 years with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Following megafires fishes thrive and amphibians persist even in severely burned watersheds
Year: 2025
Wildfires are increasing in severity, frequency and size, potentially threatening freshwater species that adapted under different disturbance regimes. However, few wildfire studies have comprehensively evaluated freshwater populations and assemblages following wildfire over broad spatial scales while accounting for post-fire salvage practices in the watershed. We reveal that stream vertebrate assemblages across thirty 4th order streams, spanning a range of both watershed fire severity and post-fire forest management extent, were minimally influenced by immediate effects of fire alone (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Integrating fire-smart fuels management with bioenergy benefits remote and Indigenous communities in Canada
Year: 2025
The global urgency of more damaging wildfires calls for proactive solutions. Integrating fire-smart fuels management with bioenergy could reduce wildfire risk while providing feedstock for bioenergy. We explore this strategy in off-grid communities in Canada who are heavily dependent on diesel for their energy needs, many of which are home to Indigenous peoples. Combining national remote sensing data and community-based information, we identify 33 diesel-dependent communities at high wildfire risk due to a large accumulation of undisturbed flammable forest. We demonstrate that 30 of these 33…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fire, managed burning, and previous wildfires reduce the severity of a southwestern US gigafire
Year: 2025
In many parts of the western United States, wildfires are becoming larger and more severe, threatening the persistence of forest ecosystems. Understanding the ways in which management activities such as prescribed fire and managed wildfire can mitigate fire severity is essential for developing effective forest conservation strategies. We evaluated the effects of previous fuels reduction treatments, including prescribed fire and wildfire managed for resource benefit, and other wildfires on the burn severity of the 2022 Black Fire in southwestern New Mexico, USA. The Black Fire burned over 131,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Innovation to support wildfire risk-based decision-making: examining the incident strategic alignment process
Year: 2025
BackgroundIn the face of increased complexity, the USDA Forest Service (Forest Service) is emphasizing the use of risk-based spatial analytics and expert coaching of fire managers through consistent processes and practices to inform safer, effective, and strategic decision-making during incident management. The Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) integrates collaborative dialogue with risk management assistance (RMA) and other spatial analytics to develop and deploy a consistent, science-based strategic planning model for incident management. An important challenge is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Leveraging wildfire to augment forest management and amplify forest resilience
Year: 2025
Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity. The probability of high-severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies to commit significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, lower severity areas of wildfires also have the potential to act as “treatments,”…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing Hydroclimatic Whiplash Can Amplify Wildfire Risk in a Warming Climate
Year: 2025
On January 7 and 8, 2025, a series of wind-driven wildfires occurred in Los Angeles County in Southern California. Two of these fires ignited in dense woody chaparral shrubland and immediately burned into adjacent populated areas–the Palisades Fire on the coastal slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Eaton fire in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Both fires ultimately eclipsed the traditionally-defined “wildland-urban interface” boundaries by burning structure-to-structure as an urban conflagration. The scope of the devastation is staggering; at the time of writing, the…
Publication Type: Report
Near real-time indicators of burn severity in the western U.S. from active fire tracking
Year: 2025
BackgroundTimely information on wildfire burn severity is critical to assess and mitigate potential post-fire impacts on soils, vegetation, and hillslope stability. Tracking individual fire spread and intensity using satellite active fire data provides a pathway to near real-time (NRT) information. Here, we generated a large database (n = 2177) of wildfire events in the western United States (U.S.) between 2012 and 2021 using active fire detections from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Farming and ranching through wildfire: Producers’ critical role in fire risk management and emergency response
Year: 2025
Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires’ impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both short and long-term repercussions, regardless of their exposure level. Producers play a central role in community emergency wildfire risk response and management by reducing fuel loads, creating defensible space, and leveraging their fire management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Long-range PM2.5 pollution and health impacts from the 2023 Canadian wildfires
Year: 2025
Smoke from extreme wildfires in Canada adversely affected air quality in many regions in 20231,2. Here we use satellite observations, machine learning and a chemical transport model to quantify global and regional PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 μm in diameter) exposure and human health impacts related to the 2023 Canadian wildfires. We find that the fires increased annual PM2.5 exposure worldwide by 0.17 μg m–3 (95% confidence interval, 0.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Causal analysis of fire regime drivers in California
Year: 2025
BackgroundUnderstanding the relative contribution of climate and human factors to wildfires is critical for managing risk across California’s diverse ecosystems, in the United States (US).AimsWe propose a model that distinguishes between proximate and ultimate drivers of fire regimes and apply it to a century of fire and climate data to assess regional variation in causal mechanisms.MethodsWe analyzed fire statistics (1910–2021) alongside climate and weather data, stratifying the state by 10 ecoregions.Key resultsNorthern…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Big trees burning: Divergent wildfire effects on large trees in open- vs. closed-canopy forests
Year: 2025
Wildfire activity has accelerated with climate change, sparking concerns about uncharacteristic impacts on mature and old-growth forests containing large trees. Recent assessments have documented fire-induced losses of large-tree habitats in the US Pacific Northwest, but key uncertainties remain regarding contemporary versus historical fire effects in different forest composition types, specific impacts on large trees within closed versus open canopies, and the role of fuel reduction treatments. Focusing on the 2021 Schneider Springs Fire, which encompassed 43,000 ha in the eastern Cascade…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Can ‘‘Fire Safe’’ Cigarettes (FSCs) Start Wildfires?
Year: 2025
Over the last 20 years, all states within the US have required all cigarettes sold to be ‘‘fire safe’’ or ‘‘fire standards compliant’’ meaning that they must pass ASTM standard E2187. Though these cigarettes are designed to self-extinguish, there have been recent studies suggesting that these ‘‘fire safe’’ cigarettes (FSCs) can still ignite mattresses and other furnishings, but there has been no guidance for fire investigators whether FSCs can ignite natural fuels, such as duff and needles, that can be the source of a wildland fire. This work sets out to investigate whether FSCs can indeed be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Resource objective wildfires shifted forest structure and fuels toward pre-fire-exclusion conditions in a remote Arizona wilderness
Year: 2025
BackgroundLarge, severe fires are increasing throughout frequent-fire forests of the western United States due to warming climatic conditions, as well as legacies of early twentieth century land-use practices and anthropogenic fire exclusion. Resource objective (RO) wildfires—where naturally ignited wildfires are allowed to burn to accomplish management objectives—are increasingly accepted due to relatively low cost and flexibility on lands where mechanical treatments are not allowed (e.g., designated wilderness) or economically feasible. We previously implemented a field…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned
Year: 2025
Rapid increases in wildfire area burned across North American forests pose novel challenges for managers and society. Increasing area burned raises questions about whether, and to what degree, contemporary fire regimes (1984–2022) are still departed from historical fire regimes (pre-1880). We use the North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN), a multi-century record comprising >1800 fire-scar sites spanning diverse forest types, and contemporary fire perimeters to ask whether there is a contemporary fire surplus or fire deficit, and whether recent fire years are unprecedented…
Publication Type: Journal Article