Research Database
Displaying 121 - 140 of 289
A Characterization of Fire-Management Research: A Bibliometric Review of Global Networks and Themes
Year: 2022
Although humans have interacted with wildfires for millennia, a science-based approach to fire management has evolved in recent decades. This paper reviews the development of firemanagement research, focusing on publications that use this term in their title, abstract, or keywords identified on the Scopus platform. This resulted in the identification of 5624 documents published between 1973 and 2021. Publication rates have particularly increased since 2010. The paper details the characteristics of this body of the literature, including the main authors, institutions, and countries.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Costs and Costs Avoided From Wildfire Fire Management—A Conceptual Framework for a Value of Information Analysis
Year: 2022
Wildfire is an integral part of many ecosystems, and wildland fires also have the potential for costly impacts to human health and safety, and damage to structures and natural resources. Public land managers use various strategies for managing landscape conditions that can affect wildfire, broadly: fuel treatment (and other pre-fire risk mitigation), fire suppression, and post-fire landscape rehabilitation. However, with any of these strategies there is considerable uncertainty in the outcomes that managers can obtain, and thus on the societal costs and benefits associated with wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, USA
Year: 2022
Wildfires devastated communities in Oregon and Washington in September 2020, burning almost as much forest west of the Cascade Mountain crest (“the westside”) in 2 weeks (~340,000 ha) as in the previous five decades (~406,00 ha). Unlike dry forests of the interior western United States, temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest have experienced limited recent fire activity, and debates surrounding what drove the 2020 fires, and management strategies to adapt to similar future events, necessitate a scientific evaluation of the fires. We evaluate five questions regarding the 2020 Labor…
Publication Type: Journal Article
More smoke today for less smoke tomorrow? We need to better understand the public health benefits and costs of prescribed fire
Year: 2022
Rapidly scaling up the use of prescribed fire is being promoted as an important pathway for reducing the growing damages of wildfire events in the United States, including limiting the health impacts from smoke emissions. However, we do not currently have the science needed to understand how the health impacts associated with prescribed fire smoke in the present compare to wildfire smoke exposure in the future. In particular, we lack an understanding of how the potential long-term public health benefits of prescribed fire on future wildfire smoke and health impacts compare to prescribed fire’…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Minimize the bad days: Wildland fire response and suppression success
Year: 2022
• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating. • By mobilizing a timely and safe initial response, early detection technologies, strategic networks of fuel breaks, and Rangeland Fire Protection Associations help “minimize the bad days” on the fireline and improve suppression…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Passive or Active Management? Understanding Consequences and Changes After Large Stand-Replacing Wildfires
Year: 2022
Every summer, wildfires burn thousands of acres of forests in the American West. After the fire, forest managers must decide what to do next: Leave the postfire landscape to recover naturally? Harvest some of the burned trees for timber? What combination of management actions is most likely to reduce the severity of a repeat wildfire and to make the forests more resilient? Morris Johnson, a research fire ecologist with the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, is working with federal and tribal forest managers to answer these questions. He is conducting long-term, replicated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Growth of the wildland-urban interface within and around U.S. National Forests and Grasslands, 1990–2010
Year: 2022
The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing is in close proximity to or intermingled with wildland vegetation, is widespread throughout the United States, but it is unclear how this type of housing development affects public lands. We used a national dataset to examine WUI distribution and growth (1990–2010) in proximity to National Forests and created a typology to characterize each National Forest’s combination of WUI area and housing growth. We found that National Forests are hotspots for WUI growth, with a 38% increase in WUI area and 46% growth in WUI houses from 1990 to 2010, in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Towards a systemic approach to fire risk management
Year: 2022
Fire risk management is at a crossroads. The last three fire seasons worldwide, dotted by extreme fire behavior and “megafire” events, highlighted the need for a shifting mentality towards a novel and integrated fire management framework, flexible, adaptive, and responsive to the changing environmental and societal conditions. In this context, the pandemic outbreak added other elements of concern due to its impacts on fire management. The health crisis shined also a spotlight on the government’s capacity to manage interconnected risks and anticipatory risk management and the urgent need to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A burning issue: Reviewing the sociodemographic and environmental justice aspects of the wildfire literature
Year: 2022
Larger and more severe wildfires are becoming more frequent and impacting different communities and human settlements. Much of the scientific literature and media on wildfires has focused on area of ecosystems burned and numbers of structures destroyed. Equally unprecedented, but often less reported, are the increasing socioeconomic impacts different people and communities face from wildfires. Such information seems to indicate an emerging need to account for wildfire effects on peri-urban or wildland urban interface (WUI) areas, newer socio-demographic groups, and disadvantaged communities.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A systematic review of empirical evidence for landscape-level fuel treatment effectiveness
Year: 2022
Background Adverse effects of wildfires can be mitigated within fuel treatments, but empirical evidence of their effectiveness across large areas is needed to guide design and implementation at the landscape level. We conducted a systematic literature review of empirically based studies that tested the influence of landscape-level fuel treatments on subsequent wildfires in North America over the past 30 years to evaluate how treatment type and configuration affect subsequent wildfire behavior or enable more effective wildfire response. Results We identified 2240 papers, but only 26 met our…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-Envisioning Wildland Fire Governance: Addressing the Transboundary, Uncertain, and Contested Aspects of Wildfire
Year: 2022
Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem. For instance, while wildfire is often described as a cross-boundary problem, understanding wildfire risk as transboundary highlights important political and institutional challenges that complicate collaboration across jurisdictions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The right to burn: barriers and opportunities for Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge, significant barriers exist for re-engaging in cultural burning. Indigenous communities in Canada have unique vulnerabilities to large and high-intensity wildfires as they are predominately located in remote, forested regions and lack financial support at federal and provincial levels to mitigate wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Comparing particulate morphology generated from human-made cellulosic fuels to natural vegetative fuels
Year: 2022
Background: In wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires, particulates from the combustion of both natural vegetative fuels and engineered cellulosic fuels may have deleterious effects on the environment. Aims: The research was conducted to investigate the morphology of the particulate samples generated from the combustion of oriented strand board (OSB). Findings were compared to the particulate samples collected from the combustion of noble-fir branches. Methods: The exposure conditions were varied to induce either smouldering combustion or flaming combustion of the specimens. Particulate samples…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping the ethical landscape of wildland fire management: setting an agendum for research and deliberation on the applied ethics of wildland fire
Year: 2022
Background: Virtually every decision within wildland fire management includes substantial ethical dimensions. As pressures increase with ever-growing fires, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools for assessing and acting on the values intrinsic to wildfire management. Aims: This paper aims to foster an applied ethics of wildland fire by bringing values to the forefront of wildland fire management debates, highlighting areas where ethical issues have been previously discussed, and providing a framework to assist in future discussion. Methods: Through a literature review and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using Structure Location Data to Map the Wildland–Urban Interface in Montana, USA
Year: 2022
The increasing wildfire activity and rapid population growth in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) have made more Americans exposed to wildfire risk. WUI mapping plays a significant role in wildfire management. This study used the Microsoft building footprint (MBF) and the Montana address/structure framework datasets to map the WUI in Montana. A systematic comparison of the following three types of WUI was performed: the WUI maps derived from the Montana address/structure framework dataset (WUI-P), the WUI maps derived from the MBF dataset (WUI-S), and the Radeloff WUI map derived from census…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Designing forest restoration projects to optimize the application of broadcast burning
Year: 2022
Active forest restoration programs on western US national forests face multiple challenges to meet their broad ecological goals while designing projects that generate sufficient revenue to build and maintain private forest management capacity needed to expand the scale and scope of treatments. We explored ways to design projects where admixing of treatments along gradients of dry and moist mixed conifer forest types could maximize financial viability while including substantial area where broadcast burning could be applied in conjunction with other treatments. In general, we found that…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene
Year: 2022
Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical changes to ecosystems, fire danger is increasing, and fires are having increasingly devastating impacts on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services. Increasing fire danger is a vexing problem that requires deep transdisciplinary, trans-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Potential operational delineations: new horizons for proactive, risk-informed strategic land and fire management
Year: 2022
Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations. Early evidence suggests PODs provide utility for planning, communication, coordination, prioritization, incident response strategy development, and fuels mitigation and forest restoration. Recent legislative action codifies the importance of PODs by devoting…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sand and fire: applying the sandpile model of self-organised criticality to wildfire mitigation
Year: 2022
Background: Prescribed burns have been increasingly utilised in forest management in the past few decades. However, their effectiveness in reducing the risk of destructive wildfires has been debated. The sandpile model of self-organised criticality, first proposed to model natural hazards, has been recently applied to wildfire research for describing a negative linear relationship between the logarithm of fire size, in area burned, and the logarithm of fire incidence number of that size. Aims: We demonstrate the applicability of the sandpile model to an understanding of wildfire incidence and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Comparing particulate morphology generated from human- made cellulosic fuels to natural vegetative fuels
Year: 2022
Background: In wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires, particulates from the combustion of both natural vegetative fuels and engineered cellulosic fuels may have deleterious effects on the environment. Aims: The research was conducted to investigate the morphology of the particulate samples generated from the combustion of oriented strand board (OSB). Findings were compared to the particulate samples collected from the combustion of noble-fir branches. Methods: The exposure conditions were varied to induce either smouldering combustion or flaming combustion of the specimens. Particulate samples…
Publication Type: Journal Article