Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 303
Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area
Year: 2024
Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables. Fragmentation caused modelled BA changes of over ±10% in 16% of [0.5°] grid-cells. On average, more fragmentation decreased net BA globally (−1.5%), as estimated empirically. However, in recently-deforested tropical areas,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire Research
Year: 2024
Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories. In short, our Peoples have always been data gatherers, and as this article presents, we are also fire data gatherers and stewards. Given the growing interest in fire research with Indigenous communities, there is an opportunity for guidance on data collection conducted equitably and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Resource objective wildfire leveraged to restore old growth forest structure while stabilizing carbon stocks in the southwestern United States
Year: 2024
Wildfire futures and aboveground carbon (C) dynamics associated with forest restoration programs that integrate resource objective wildfire as part of a larger treatment strategy are not well understood. Using simulation modeling, we examined alternative forest and fuel management strategies on a 237,218-ha study area within a 778,000-ha landscape that is a high priority target for federal restoration programs. We simulated two wildfire management scenarios combined with three levels of conventional forest restoration treatments over 64 years using a detailed landscape disturbance and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel types misrepresent forest structure and composition in interior British Columbia: a way forward
Year: 2024
A clear understanding of the connectivity, structure, and composition of wildland fuels is essential for effective wildfire management. However, fuel typing and mapping are challenging owing to a broad diversity of fuel conditions and their spatial and temporal heterogeneity. In Canada, fuel types and potential fire behavior are characterized using the Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) System, which uses an association approach to categorize vegetation into 16 fuel types based on stand structure and composition. In British Columbia (BC), provincial and national FBP System fuel type maps are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Constraints on Mechanical Fuel Reduction Treatments in United States Forest Service Wildfire Crisis Strategy Priority Landscapes
Year: 2024
The USDA Forest Service recently launched a Wildfire Crisis Strategy outlining objectives to safeguard communities and other values at risk by substantially increasing the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatment. This analysis quantified layered operational constraints to mechanical fuel reduction treatments, including existing vegetation, protected areas, steep slopes, and administrative boundaries in twenty-one prioritized landscapes. Results suggest that achieving the objective to treat 20%–40% of high-risk area is unlikely in most landscapes under a business-as-usual approach to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disentangling drivers of annual grass invasion: Abiotic susceptibility vs. fire-induced conversion to cheatgrass dominance in the sagebrush biome
Year: 2024
Invasive annual grasses are often facilitated by fire, yet they can become ecologically dominant in susceptible locations even in the absence of fire. We used an extensive vegetation plot database to model susceptibility to the invasive annual grass cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) in the sagebrush biome as a function of climate and soil water availability variables. We built random forest models predicting cheatgrass presence or dominance (>15 % relative cover) under unburned (37,219 plots) and burned conditions (6340 plots). We mapped predicted probability of cheatgrass…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Maximizing opportunities for co-implementing fuel break networks and restoration projects
Year: 2024
Increasing impacts from wildfires are reshaping fire policies worldwide, with expanded investments in a wide range of fuel reduction strategies. In many fire prone regions, especially in the Mediterranean basin, fuel management programs have relied on fuel break networks for decades to facilitate fire suppression and reduce area burned and damage. By contrast, on the fire prone federal forests in the western United States, fuel management is guided primarily by landscape restoration goals, including improving fire resiliency such that wildfires can be managed for ecological benefit, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managed burning of forests: Balancing economic incentives, risks, and liability
Year: 2024
Managed burning of forests can provide benefits to society including mitigated wildfire risk, improved habitat, and more. However, adverse outcomes of escaped fire or smoke pose risks. I reviewed the evolution of the law regulating forest management burns, explored the current legal architecture, and analyzed the economic incentives for involved actors, in order to identify policy options. Liability standards through most of the twentieth century increasingly placed risk burden on landowners and burners, but increased recognition of the benefits of burns led many States to reverse this trend…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Conceptual Framework for Knowledge Exchange in a Wildland Fire Research and Practice Context
Year: 2023
Wildland fire is an important natural disturbance in many vegetated areas of the world. However, fire management actions are critical not only to prevent and suppress unwanted fires, but also mitigate and recover from the negative impacts of fire on people and communities. Advancements in wildland fire science can help inform these necessary actions in wildland fire management. How science is created and integrated into these fire management decision-making processes, whether through collaborations with external researchers and/or with scientists within a wildland fire management agency…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Futures
Year: 2023
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using PODs to integrate fire and fuels planning
Year: 2023
BackgroundPotential Wildfire Operational Delineations (PODs) were developed as a pre-season planning tool to promote safe and effective fire response. Past research on PODs has identified uses in an incident management context. There has been little research on how PODs are being utilised in non-incident management contexts to align forest and wildfire planning objectives.AimsWe sought to understand how actors are adopting and adapting the PODs framework to inform non-incident management, and to identify facilitators, barriers and recommendations.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How Does Fire Suppression Alter the Wildfire Regime? A Systematic Review
Year: 2023
Fire suppression has become a fundamental approach for shaping contemporary wildfire regimes. However, a growing body of research suggests that aggressive fire suppression can increase high-intensity wildfires, creating the wildfire paradox. Whether the strategy always triggers the paradox remains a topic of ongoing debate. The role of fire suppression in altering wildfire regimes in diverse socio-ecological systems and associated research designs demands a deeper understanding. To reconcile these controversies and synthesize the existing knowledge, a systematic review has been conducted to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study
Year: 2023
Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—areincreasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communitiesin fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporatepyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animaldistributionsandabundancetosupportpost-firemanagement.Weusetheblack-backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study todemonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitatassessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A data‐driven analysis and optimization of the impact of prescribed fire programs on wildfire risk in different regions of the USA
Year: 2023
In the current century, wildfires have shown an increasing trend, causing a huge amount of direct and indirect losses in society. Different methods and efforts have been employed to reduce the frequency and intensity of the damages, one of which is implementing prescribed fires. Previous works have established that prescribed fires are effective at reducing the damage caused by wildfires. However, the actual impact of prescribed fire programs is dependent on factors such as where and when prescribed fires are conducted. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven model studying the impact…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest water-use efficiency: Effects of climate change and management on the coupling of carbon and water processes
Year: 2023
Forests are essential in regulating global carbon and water cycles and are critical in mitigating climate change. Water-use efficiency, defined by the ratio of plant productivity per unit water use, is widely used to quantify the interactions between forest carbon and water cycles and could be potentially used to manage the carbon and water tradeoffs of forests under different environmental conditions. This paper reviews the literature on how biophysical variables and management practices affect forest water-use efficiency. We found that water-use efficiency varies greatly with forest type,…
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
Exploring and Testing Wildfire Risk Decision-Making in the Face of Deep Uncertainty
Year: 2023
We integrated a mechanistic wildfire simulation system with an agent-based landscape change model to investigate the feedbacks among climate change, population growth, development, landowner decision-making, vegetative succession, and wildfire. Our goal was to develop an adaptable simulation platform for anticipating risk-mitigation tradeoffs in a fire-prone wildland–urban interface (WUI) facing conditions outside the bounds of experience. We describe how five social and ecological system (SES) submodels interact over time and space to generate highly variable alternative futures even within…
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
Homeowner firewise behaviors in fire-prone central Oregon: An exploration of the attitudinal, situational, and cultural worldviews impacting pre-fire mitigation actions Author links open overlay panel
Year: 2023
Highlights • People with egalitarian cultural traits are more likely to engage in fire mitigation behaviors. • Concern, experience, and proximity all have a positive relationship to engagement in fire mitigation behaviors. • Fire-resistant building materials and landscaping requirements are effective policy tools for homeowner mitigation actions. • Younger homeowners and women are more likely to engage in fire mitigation actions. Abstract As a result of climate change and past management practices, wildfires are becoming larger and occurring more frequently than ever before in the Western U.S…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid fuel recovery after stand-replacing fire in closed-cone pine forests and implications for short-interval severe reburns
Year: 2023
Accelerating disturbance activity under a warming climate increases the potential for multiple disturbances to overlap and produce compound effects that erode ecosystem resilience — the capacity to experience disturbance without transitioning to an alternative state. A key concern is the potential for amplifying or attenuating feedbacks via interactions among successive, linked disturbance events. Following severe wildfires, fuel limitation is a negative feedback that may reduce the likelihood of subsequent fire. However, the duration of, and pre-fire vegetation effects on fuel limitation…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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