Research Database
Displaying 81 - 100 of 319
Metrics and Considerations for Evaluating How Forest Treatments Alter Wildfire Behavior and Effects
Year: 2023
The influence of forest treatments on wildfire effects is challenging to interpret. This is, in part, because the impact forest treatments have on wildfire can be slight and variable across many factors. Effectiveness of a treatment also depends on the metric considered. We present and define human–fire interaction, fire behavior, and ecological metrics of forest treatment effects on wildfire and discuss important considerations and recommendations for evaluating treatments. We demonstrate these concepts using a case study from the Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado, USA. Pre-fire forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Identifying building locations in the wildland–urban interface before and after fires with convolutional neural networks
Year: 2023
Background: Wildland–urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated owing to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown. Additionally, CNNs are computationally intensive and technically complex, making them challenging for end-users, such as those who use or create WUI maps, to apply.Aims: We identified buildings pre- and post-wildfire and estimated building destruction for three…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimizing the implementation of a forest fuel break network
Year: 2023
Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires. A key question facing managers is how to scale treatments into manageable project areas that meet operational and administrative constraints, and then prioritize their implementation over time to maximize fire management outcomes. We developed and tested a spatial modeling system to optimize the implementation of a proposed 3,538 km fuel break network…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors influencing ember accumulation near a building
Year: 2023
Background: Embers, also known as firebrands, are the leading cause of building ignition during wildland–urban fires. This is attributed both to direct ignition of material on, in, or attached to the building, and indirect ignition where they ignite vegetation or other combustible material near the building, which results in a radiant heat and/or direct flame contact exposure that ignites the building. Indirect ignition of a building can occur when embers accumulate on and ignite nearby combustible fuel, resulting in radiant heat or flame constant exposure. Aims/implications: Factors that…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool: Facilitating Social Learning and a Science of Practice
Year: 2023
Wildfire science, policy, and practice lack systematic means for “tailoring” fire adaptation practices to socially diverse human populations and in ways that aggregate existing lessons. This article outlines the development and initial operationalization of the Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool, an inductive set of processes that help facilitate dialogue about needs and priorities for wildfire adaptation strategies across ownership boundaries or partners. We outline the stages and considerations organized by the tool, including how its components build from decades of social science and…
Communicating about Fire, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managed Wildfire: A Research Synthesis and Overview
Year: 2023
All wildfires in the United States are managed, but the strategies used to manage them vary by region and season. “Managed wildfire” is a response strategy to naturally ignited wildfires; it does not prioritize full suppression and allows the fire to fulfill its natural role on the landscape, meeting objectives such as firefighter safety, resource benefit, and community protection. This wildfire management strategy can be effective for reducing tree densities, landscape homogeneity, fuel load continuity, and future fire behavior, while also working to reintroduce fire to fire-prone ecosystems…
Publication Type: Report
Community Forests advance local wildfire governance and proactive management in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2023
As wildfires are increasingly causing negative impacts to communities and their livelihoods, many communities are demanding more proactive and locally driven approaches to address wildfire risk. This marks a shift away from centralized governance models where decision-making is concentrated in government agencies that prioritize reactive wildfire suppression. In British Columbia (BC), Canada, Community Forests—a long-term, area-based tenure granted to Indigenous and/or local communities—are emerging as local leaders facilitating proactive wildfire management. To explore the factors that are…
Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring the impact of airtanker drops on in-stand temperature and relative humidity
Year: 2023
Background. There has been little quantification of the extent and duration of micro- meteorological changes within a forest after airtanker drops of water-based suppressant. It has been speculated that a period of prolonged relative humidity – referred to as a ‘relative humidity (RH) bubble’ – temporarily exists in the canopy understorey post-drop. Aims. We quantify the RH bubble from the drops of five airtankers commonly used by wildland fire management organisations in Canada. Methods. We measured airtankers dropping water, foam concentrates, and gel enhancers in a mature jack pine stand.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Unprotected lands: A case study of a wildland-urban interface community in “No-Man's land”
Year: 2023
There are areas of the United States that have no formalized fire protection. These lands are colloquially referred to as “no-man’s land” but are recognized by many land management agencies as unprotected lands. Unprotected lands are generally rural landscapes and exist in areas that are sparsely populated and lack formalized fire protection. In some cases, lands that are designated as wildland-urban interface are comprised of significant portions of unprotected lands. Currently, there has been little in the way of research completed that pertains to the overall amount of land that is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Future regional increases in simultaneous large Western USA wildfires
Year: 2023
Background: Wildfire simultaneity affects the availability and distribution of resources for fire management: multiple small fires require more resources to fight than one large fire does. Aims: The aim of this study was to project the effects of climate change on simultaneous large wildfires in the Western USA, regionalised by administrative divisions used for wildfire management. Methods: We modelled historical wildfire simultaneity as a function of selected fire indexes using generalised linear models trained on observed climate and fire data from 1984 to 2016. We then applied these models…
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
Water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation in watersheds in the western United States
Year: 2023
Scaling up climate-adaptation in wildfire-prone watersheds requires innovative partnerships and funding. Water utilities are one stakeholder group that could play a role in these efforts. The overarching purpose of this study was to understand water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation efforts in the western United States. We conducted an online survey of water utilities in nine states and received 173 useable responses. While most (68%) respondents were concerned or very concerned about future wildfire events and the impact of wildfire on their operations, only 39% perceived their…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Creating Fire-Adapted Communities Through Recovery: Case Studies from the United States and Australia
Year: 2023
Wildfires can be devastating for social and ecological systems, but the recovery period after wildfire presents opportunities to reduce future risk through adaptation. We use a collective case study approach to systematically compare social and ecological recovery following four major fire events in Australia and the United States: the 1998 wildfires in northeastern Florida; the 2003 Cedar fire in southern California; the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, southeastern Australia; and the 2011 Bastrop fires in Texas. Fires spurred similar policy changes, with an emphasis on education,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Connecting dryland fine-fuel assessments to wildfire exposure and natural resource values at risk
Year: 2023
Background Wildland fire in arid and semi-arid (dryland) regions can intensify when climatic, biophysical, and land-use factors increase fuel load and continuity. To inform wildland fire management under these conditions, we developed high-resolution (10-m) estimates of fine fuel across the Altar Valley in southern Arizona, USA, which spans dryland, grass-dominated ecosystems that are administered by multiple land managers and owners. We coupled field measurements at the end of the 2021 growing season with Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and vegetation indices acquired during and after the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evidence for multi-decadal fuel buildup in a large California wildfire from smoke radiocarbon measurements
Year: 2023
In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in annual area burned in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. This rise in fire activity has prompted the need to understand how historical forest management practices affect fuel composition and emissions. Here we examined the total carbon (TC) concentration and radiocarbon abundance (Δ14C) of particulate matter (PM) emitted by the KNP Complex Fire, which occurred during California's 2021 wildfire season and affected several groves of giant sequoia trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. During a 26 h sampling period, we measured…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cross-boundary cooperation in wildfire management during the custodial management period of the US Forest Service: A case study of the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA, 1905–1945
Year: 2023
In the U.S., federal, tribal, state, local, and private land management entities seek to implement a wildfire management strategy that spans large spatial extents and multiple ownerships to achieve wildfire risk reduction and forest restoration. This strategy requires cross-boundary cooperation. Cooperative cross-boundary forest management is not new; yet little case study research has documented historical examples. This study provides insight into how potentially overlooked models of cross-boundary cooperation of the past may be applicable to renewed cross-boundary cooperation today. We…
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
Changes in wildfire occurrence and risk to homes from 1990 through 2019 in the Southern Rocky Mountains, USA
Year: 2023
Wildfires and housing development have increased since the 1990s, presenting unique challenges for wildfire management. However, it is unclear how the relative influences of housing growth and changing wildfire occurrence have altered risk to homes, or the potential for wildfire to threaten homes. We used a random forests model to predict burn probability in relation to weather variables at 1-km resolution and monthly intervals from 1990 through 2019 in the Southern Rocky Mountains ecoregion. We quantified risk by combining the predicted burn probabilities with decadal housing density. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland–Urban Interface: Definition and Physical Fire Risk Mitigation Measures, a Systematic Review
Year: 2023
Due to the associated fire risk, the wildland–urban interface (WUI) has drawn the attention of researchers and managers from a range of backgrounds. From a land management point of view, it is important to identify the WUI to determine areas to prioritise for fire risk prevention. It is also important to know the fire risk mitigation measures available to select the most appropriate for each specific context. In this systematic review, definitions of the WUI were investigated and physical mitigation measures for reducing the risk of fire were examined from a land management perspective. The…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Wildland Firefighters’ Assessments of Structure Defensibility
Year: 2023
In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility.…
Publication Type: Journal Article