Research Database
Displaying 181 - 200 of 252
Risk terminology primer: Basic principles and a glossary for the wildland fire management community
Year: 2016
Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application. In response, this General Technical Report provides a set of clear, consistent, understandable, and usable definitions for terms associated with wildland fire risk management. The material presented herein is not brand-new or innovative per se, but rather synthesizes the extant science so that readers can readily make a crosswalk to the professional literature.…
Publication Type: Report
Quantifying the influence of previously burned areas on suppression effectiveness and avoided exposure: a case study of the Las Conchas Fire
Year: 2016
We present a case study of the Las Conchas Fire (2011) to explore the role of previously burned areas (wildfires and prescribed fires) on suppression effectiveness and avoided exposure. Methodological innovations include characterisation of the joint dynamics of fire growth and suppression activities, development of a fire line effectiveness framework, and quantification of relative fire line efficiencies inside and outside of previously burned areas. We provide descriptive statistics of several fire line effectiveness metrics. Additionally, we leverage burn probability modelling to examine…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining alternative fuel management strategies and the relative contribution of National Forest System land to wildfire risk to adjacent homes – A pilot assessment on the Sierra National Forest, California, USA
Year: 2016
Determining the degree of risk that wildfires pose to homes, where across the landscape the risk originates, and who can best mitigate risk are integral elements of effective co-management of wildfire risk. Developing assessments and tools to help provide this information is a high priority for federal land management agencies such as the US Forest Service (USFS) that have limited resources to invest in hazardous fuel reduction and other mitigation activities. In this manuscript we investigate the degree to which fuel management practices on USFS land can reduce wildfire exposure to human…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Insights from wildfire science: a resource for fire policy discussions
Year: 2016
Record blazes swept across parts of the US in 2015, burning more than 10 million acres. The four biggest fire seasons since 1960 have all occurred in the last 10 years, leading to fears of a ‘new normal’ for wildfire. Fire fighters and forest managers are overwhelmed, and it is clear that the policy and management approaches of the past will not suffice under this new era of western wildfires. In recent decades, state and federal policymakers, tribes, and others are confronting longer fire seasons (Jolly et al. 2015), more large fires (Dennison et al. 2014), a tripling of homes burned, and a…
Publication Type: Report
Wilderness in the 21st Century: A Framework for Testing Assumptions about Ecological Intervention in Wilderness Using a Case Study in Fire Ecology in the Rocky Mountains
Year: 2016
Changes in the climate and in key ecological processes are prompting increased debate about ecological restoration and other interventions in wilderness. The prospect of intervention in wilderness raises legal, scientific, and values-based questions about the appropriateness of possible actions. In this article, we focus on the role of science to elucidate the potential need for intervention. We review the meaning of “untrammeled” from the 1964 Wilderness Act to aid our understanding of the legal context for potential interventions in wilderness. We explore the tension between restraint and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating Prescribed Fire Effectiveness Using Permanent Monitoring Plot Data: A Case Study
Year: 2016
Since Euro-American settlement, ponderosa pine forests throughout the western United States have shifted from high fire frequency and open canopy savanna forests to infrequent fire and dense, closed canopy forests. Managers at Zion National Park, USA, reintroduced fire to counteract these changes and decrease the potential for high-severity fires. We analyzed existing permanent monitoring plot data collected between 1995 and 2010 to assess achievement of management objectives related to prescribed fire in ponderosa pine forests. Following first entry fire, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa C.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Risk management: Core principles and practices, and their relevance to wildland fire
Year: 2016
The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture faces a future of increasing complexity and risk, pressing financial issues, and the inescapable possibility of loss of human life. These issues are perhaps most acute for wildland fire management, the highest risk activity in which the Forest Service engages. Risk management (RM) has long been put forth as an appropriate approach for addressing fire, and agency-wide adoption of RM principles and practices will be critical to bring about necessary change and improve future decisions. To facilitate more comprehensive adoption of formal RM…
Publication Type: Report
Achievable future conditions as a framework for guiding forest conservation and management
Year: 2016
We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and management will be inadequate given the predicted scale of social-economic and biophysical changes in the 21st century. New approaches, focused on anticipating and guiding ecological responses to change, are urgently needed to ensure the full value of forest ecosystem services for future generations. These approaches acknowledge that change is inevitable and sometimes irreversible, and that maintenance of ecosystem services depends in part on novel ecosystems, i.e., species combinations with no analog in the past. We propose…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Available Science Assessment Project: Prescribed Fire and Climate Change in Northwest National Forests
Year: 2016
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing natural resource management. The disruptions it is causing require that we change how we consider conservation and resource management in order to ensure the future of habitats, species, and human communities, whether that means adopting new actions or adjusting the ways in which existing actions are implemented. However, practitioners often struggle with how to identify and prioritize specific climate adaptation actions, which are taken to either increase/enhance resilience or decrease vulnerability in a changing climate. Management…
Publication Type: Report
Forest management scenarios in a changing climate: trade-offs between carbon, timber, and old forest
Year: 2016
Balancing economic, ecological, and social values has long been a challenge in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where conflict over timber harvest and old-growth habitat on public lands has been contentious for the past several decades. The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted two decades ago to guide management on federal lands, is currently being revised as the region searches for a balance between sustainable timber yields and habitat for sensitive species. In addition, climate change imposes a high degree of uncertainty on future forest productivity, sustainability of timber harvest,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recovery and adaptation after wildfire on the Colorado Front Range (2010-2012)
Year: 2016
Following the loss of homes to wildfire, when risk has been made apparent, homeowners must decide whether to rebuild, and choose materials and vegetation, while local governments guide recovery and rebuilding. As wildfires are smaller and more localised than other disasters, it is unclear if recovery after wildfire results in policy change and adaptation, decreasing assets at risk, or if recovery encourages reinvestment in hazard-prone areas. We studied three wildfires on the Colorado Front Range from2010 to 2012 that each destroyed over 150homes, describing policy response and characterising…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Developing and Implementing Climate Change Adaptation Options in Forest Ecosystems: A Case Study in Southwestern Oregon, USA
Year: 2016
Climate change will likely have significant effects on forest ecosystems worldwide. In Mediterranean regions, such as that in southwestern Oregon, USA, changes will likely be driven mainly by wildfire and drought. To minimize the negative effects of climate change, resource managers require tools and information to assess climate change vulnerabilities and to develop and implement adaptation actions. We developed an approach to facilitate development and implementation of climate change adaptation options in forest management. This approach, applied in a southwestern Oregon study region,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges
Year: 2016
Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse, international and interdisciplinary expertise, we outline generalizable properties of fire-adaptive communities in varied settings where cultural knowledge of fire is rich and diverse. At the national scale, we discussed policy and management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Facilitating knowledge transfer between researchers and wildfire practitioners about trust: An international case study
Year: 2016
The importance of knowledge transfer between researchers, policy makers and practitioners is widely recognized. However, barriers to knowledge transfer can make it difficult for practitioners to apply the results of scientific research. This paper describes a project that addressed barriers to knowledge transfer by involving wildfire management practitioners from three countries in developing a trust planning guide. The guide provides information about trust, factors that influence trust and actions that can be taken to build trust in the context of wildfire management. The researchers…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Passing of the Lolo Trail, with an Introduction by Andrew J. Larson
Year: 2016
In 1935, Elers Koch argued in a Journal of Forestry article that a minimum fire protection model should be implemented in the backcountry areas of national forests in Idaho, USA. As a USDA Forest Service Supervisor and Assistant Regional Forester, Koch had led many major fire-fighting campaigns in the region, beginning with the great 1910 fires of Idaho and Montana. He argued in his classic article for wilderness values, and against throwing millions of dollars into unsuccessful attempts to suppress backcountry fires. His article was accompanied by a response from Earl Loveridge, a proponent…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing the impacts of federal forest planning on wildfire risk-mitigation in the Pacific Northwest, USA
Year: 2016
We analyzed the impact of amenity and biodiversity protection as mandated in national forest plans on the implementation of hazardous fuel reduction treatments aimed at protecting the wildland urban interface (WUI) and restoring fire resilient forests. We used simulation modeling to delineate areas on national forests that can potentially transmit fires to adjacent WUI. We then intersected these areas with national forest planning maps to determine where mechanical treatments are allowed for restoration and fire protection, versus areas where they are prohibited. We found that a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
U.S. wildfire governance as social-ecological problem
Year: 2016
There are fundamental spatial and temporal disconnects between the specific policies that have been crafted to address our wildfire challenges. The biophysical changes in fuels, wildfire behavior, and climate have created a new set of conditions for which our wildfire governance system is poorly suited to address. To address these challenges, a reorientation of goals is needed to focus on creating an anticipatory wildfire governance system focused on social and ecological resilience. Key characteristics of this system could include the following: (1) not taking historical patterns as givens…
Publication Type: Journal Article
U.S. federal fire and forest policy: emphasizing resilience in dry forests
Year: 2016
Current U.S. forest fire policy emphasizes short-term outcomes versus long-term goals. This perspective drives managers to focus on the protection of high-valued resources, whether ecosystem-based or developed infrastructure, at the expense of forest resilience. Given these current and future challenges posed by wildland fire and because the U.S. Forest Service spent >50% of its budget on fire suppression in 2015, a review and reexamination of existing policy is warranted. One of the most difficult challenges to revising forest fire policy is that agency organizations and decision making…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Winter grazing can reduce wildfire size, intensity and behaviour in a shrub-grassland
Year: 2015
An increase in mega-fires and wildfires is a global issue that is expected to become worse with climate change. Fuel treatments are often recommended to moderate behaviour and decrease severity of wildfires; however, the extensive nature of rangelands limits the use of many treatments. Dormant-season grazing has been suggested as a rangeland fuel treatment, but its effects on fire characteristics are generally unknown. We investigated the influence of dormant-season (winter) grazing by cattle (Bos taurus) on fuel characteristics, fire behaviour and area burned in Wyoming big sagebrush (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Principles of effective USA Federal Fire Management Plans
Year: 2015
Federal fire management plans are essential implementation guides for the management of wildland fire on federal lands. Recent changes in federal fire policy implementation guidance and fire science information suggest the need for substantial changes in federal fire management plans of the United States. Federal land management agencies are also undergoing land management planning efforts that will initiate revision of fire management plans across the country. Using the southern Sierra Nevada as a case study, we briefly describe the underlying framework of fire management plans, assess their…
Publication Type: Journal Article