Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 169
Proposing a Governance Model for Environmental Crises
Year: 2023
During August 2021, a wildfire outbreak in Evia, Greece’s second largest island, resulted in a major environmental and economic crisis. Apart from biodiversity and habitat loss, the disaster triggered a financial crisis because it wiped out wood-productive forests and outdoor areas that attract visitors. This crisis highlighted the need for a new governance model in order to respond to environmental crises more effectively. The aim of this study was to investigate the acceptance and attitudes of relevant stakeholders towards establishing a Hub—a proposed governance model responsible for…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessment of wildland firefighter opinions and experiences related to incident medical providers
Year: 2023
Background. Medical services for wildland fire incidents are vital and fire personnel need to be comfortable seeking care and have adequate access to care. Aims. The aim of this study was to examine wildland firefighters’ (WLFFs) attitudes towards, opinions of and experiences with the medical services on fire assignments. Methods. A survey was used to collect information from WLFFs. The survey covered: (1) demographics, (2) injury descriptions, (3) trust/respect toward medical personnel, and (4) perceived impact of injury treatment on individual and team deploy- ability. Analysis used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The century-long shadow of fire exclusion: Historical data reveal early and lasting effects of fire regime change on contemporary forest composition
Year: 2023
Historical logging practices and fire exclusion have reduced the proportion of pine in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States. To better understand pine’s decline, we investigate the impact of historical logging on the tree regeneration layer and subsequent stand development over almost a century of fire exclusion. We use a unique dataset derived from contemporary (∼2016) remeasurement of 440 historical quadrats (∼4m2) in the central Sierra Nevada, California, in which overstory trees, tree regeneration, and microsite conditions were measured and mapped both before and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel Profiles and Biomass Carbon Following Bark Beetle Outbreaks: Insights for Disturbance Interactions from a Historical Silvicultural Experiment
Year: 2023
Anticipating consequences of disturbance interactions on ecosystem structure and function is a critical management priority as disturbance activity increases with warming climate. Across the Northern Hemisphere, extensive tree mortality from recent bark beetle outbreaks raises concerns about potential fire behavior and post-fire forest function. Silvicultural treatments (that is, partial or complete cutting of forest stands) may reduce outbreak severity and subsequent fuel loads, but longevity of pre-outbreak treatment effects on outbreak severity and post-outbreak fuel profiles remains…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk, salience, and housing development in the wildland–urban interface
Year: 2023
As wildfires increase in both severity and frequency, understanding the role of risk saliency on human behaviors in the face of fire risks becomes paramount. While research has shown that homebuyers capitalize wildfire risk following a fire, studies of the role that risk saliency plays on residential development is limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the link between wildfire risk saliency and the rate of residential development in wildfire-prone areas, by treating recent wildfires as conditionally exogenous shocks to saliency. Using geospatial data on residential…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Frequency of disturbance mitigates high-severity fire in the Lake Tahoe Basin, California and Nevada
Year: 2022
Because of past land use changes and changing climate, forests are moving outside of their historical range of variation. As fires become more severe, forest managers are searching for strategies that can restore forest health and reduce fire risk. However, management activities are only one part of a suite of disturbance vectors that shape forest conditions. To account for the range of disturbance intensities and disturbance types (wildfire, bark beetles, and management), we developed a disturbance return interval (DRI) that represents the average return period for any disturbance, human or…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Expanding wildland-urban interface alters forest structure and landscape context in the northern United States
Year: 2022
The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing intermingles with wildland vegetation, is the fastest-growing land use type in the United States. Given the ecological and social benefits of forest ecosystems, there is a growing need to more fully understand how such development alters the landscape context and structure of these WUI forests. In a space-for-time analysis we utilized land cover data, forest inventory plots, and housing density data over time to examine differences in forest characteristics of the northern US across three WUI change classes: (a) forest that has been in WUI…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effectiveness of fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs in wildland firefighting: a cluster randomised control trial
Year: 2022
Critical to effective fire management is the protection and preparedness of highly trained wildland firefighters who routinely face extreme physical and psychological demands. To date, there is limited scientific evidence of psychosocial education intervention effectiveness in this context. The objective of the current study is to utilise a cluster randomised control trial study design to evaluate fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs across a wildland fire season. Wildland firefighters (n = 230) were randomly assigned by their work location to one of four…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The complexity of biological disturbance agents, fuels heterogeneity, and fire in coniferous forests of the western United States
Year: 2022
Forest biological disturbance agents (BDAs) are insects, pathogens, and parasitic plants that affect tree decline, mortality, and forest ecosystems processes. BDAs are commonly thought to increase the likelihood and severity of fire by converting live standing trees to more flammable, dead and downed fuel. However, recent research indicates that BDAs do not necessarily increase, and can reduce, the likelihood or severity of fire. This has led to confusion regarding the role of BDAs in influencing fuels and fire in fire-prone western United States forests. Here, we review the existing…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Future climate risks from stress, insects and fire across US forests
Year: 2022
Forests are currently a substantial carbon sink globally. Many climate change mitigation strategies leverage forest preservation and expansion, but rely on forests storing carbon for decades to centuries. Yet climate-driven disturbances pose critical risks to the long-term stability of forest carbon. We quantify the climate drivers that influence wildfire and climate stress-driven tree mortality, including a separate insect-driven tree mortality, for the contiguous United States for current (1984–2018) and project these future disturbance risks over the 21st century. We find that current…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The US Forest Service Life First safety initiative: exploring unnecessary exposure to risk
Year: 2022
In 2016, the US Forest Service initiated small-group safety discussions among members of its wildland firefighting organisation. Known as the Life First National Engagement Sessions, the discussions presented an opportunity for wildland firefighters to address systemic and cultural dysfunctions in the wildland fire system. The Life First initiative included a post-engagement survey in which more than 2600 Forest Service employees provided open-ended feedback. In that qualitative subset of results, survey respondents described four main situations in which wildland firefighters commonly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human- and lightning-caused wildland fire ignition clusters in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire ignitions in BC using data from 2006 to 2020. We found that human-caused ignition clusters tended to occur around population centres, First Nations communities, roads and valleys, and were more common in the southern half of the province, which is more populated. Lightning-ignition clusters were generally…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modern Pyromes: Biogeographical Patterns of Fire Characteristics across the Contiguous United States
Year: 2022
In recent decades, wildfires in many areas of the United States (U.S.) have become larger and more frequent with increasing anthropogenic pressure, including interactions between climate, land-use change, and human ignitions. We aimed to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of contemporary fire characteristics across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We derived fire variables based on frequency, fire radiative power (FRP), event size, burned area, and season length from satellite-derived fire products and a government records database on a 50 km grid (1984–2020). We used k-means…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human ignitions on private lands drive USFS cross‑boundary wildfire transmission and community impacts in the western US
Year: 2022
Wildfires in the western United States (US) are increasingly expensive, destructive, and deadly. Reducing wildfire losses is particularly challenging when fires frequently start on one land tenure and damage natural or developed assets on other ownerships. Managing wildfire risk in multijurisdictional landscapes has recently become a centerpiece of wildfire strategic planning, legislation, and risk research. However, important empirical knowledge gaps remain regarding cross-boundary fire activity in the western US. Here, we use lands administered by the US Forest Service as a study system to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disturbance and Sustainability in Forests of the Western United States
Year: 2021
This report assesses recent forest disturbance in the Western United States and discusses implications for sustainability. Individual chapters focus on fire, drought, insects, disease, invasive plants, and socioeconomic impacts. Disturbance data came from a variety of sources, including the Forest Inventory and Analysis program, Forest Health Protection, and the National Interagency Fire Center. Disturbance trends with the potential to affect forest sustainability include alterations in fire regimes, periods of drought in some parts of the region, and increases in invasive plants, insects,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contrasting the role of human- and lightning-caused wildfires on future fire regimes on a Central Oregon landscape
Year: 2021
Climate change is expected to increase fire activity in many regions of the globe, but the relative role of human vs. lightning-caused ignitions on future fire regimes is unclear. We developed statistical models that account for the spatiotemporal ignition patterns by cause in the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Oregon, USA. Projected changes in energy release component from a suite of climate models were used with our model to quantify changes in frequency and extent of human and lightning-caused fires and record-breaking events based on sizes of individual fires between contemporary (2006…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The "strings attached" to community difference and potential pathways to fire adaptiveness in the wildland urban interface
Year: 2021
This article identifies specific social characteristics in two wildland urban interface communities that may have significant impacts on the ability of those communities to adapt to wildfire. Researchers used a mixed-methods approach to triangulate results to identify potential views and motives surrounding three important behaviors and values related to crafting potential strategies to mitigate wildfire risk. The analysis of quantitative data in the form of responses to Likert-type questions and qualitative data in the form of responses to questions asked during focus group sessions yielded…
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
Roles and experiences of non-governmental organisations in wildfire response and recovery
Year: 2021
Local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play critical roles in providing immediate relief resources and long-term recovery support for communities after a disaster. Drawing on interviews with NGO representatives involved in three Northern California wildfires in 2017 and 2018, this study identifies challenges and opportunities for NGOs supporting wildfire relief and recovery. Across fires and NGOs, NGO management and wellbeing, coordination and disaster experiences emerge as common barriers and enablers of relief and recovery. In many cases, local NGOs’ participation in wildfire relief…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessment of Early Implementation of the US Forest Service’s Shared Stewardship Strategy
Year: 2021
In 2019, Colorado State University entered into a challenge cost-share agreement with USFS State and Private Forestry to conduct independent research on the implementation and development of Shared Stewardship efforts. The first phase of our work took place in 2020, when we interviewed agency and state employees and representatives of partner organizations in states in the West that had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU)with the USFS to formally pursue Shared Stewardship. Our primary goal was to understand the main factors affecting the early stages of Shared Stewardship efforts…
Publication Type: Report