Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 34
Lizards' response to the sound of fire is modified by fire history
Year: 2023
Highlights • Lizards surviving wildfires are more alert to fire sound than those in unburned areas. • Lizards living in urban areas reacted to fire sound similarly to wildfire survivors. • Both natural and human-driven disturbances can shape the behaviour of animals. • Fires are likely to be an important selective pressure on animal behaviour. Many animals survive wildfires; however, the mechanisms used to detect and respond to fire have been poorly studied. Sensory cues like sight and sound are used to recognize threats (e.g. predators) and elicit escape responses in prey. Similarly, these…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fire after thinning increased resistance of sub-Mediterranean pine forests to drought events and wildfires
Year: 2023
Vegetation structure affects the vulnerability of a forest to drought events and wildfires. Management decisions, such as thinning intensity and type of understory treatment, influence competition for water resources and amount of fuel available. While heavy thinning effectively reduces tree water stress and intensity of a crown fire, the duration of these benefits may be limited by a fast growth response of the understory. Our aim was to study the effect of forest structure on pine forests vulnerability to extreme drought events and on the potential wildfire behaviour after management, with…
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
Rethinking the focus on forest fires in federal wildland fire management: Landscape patterns and trends of non-forest and forest burned area
Year: 2023
For most of the 20th century and beyond, national wildland fire policies concerning fire suppression and fuels management have primarily focused on forested lands. Using summary statistics and landscape metrics, wildfire spatial patterns and trends for non-forest and forest burned area over the past two decades were examined across the U.S, and federal agency jurisdictions. This study found that wildfires burned more area of non-forest lands than forest lands at the scale of the conterminous and western U.S. and the Department of Interior (DOI). In an agency comparison, 74% of DOI burned area…
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
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
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
Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis
Year: 2023
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors…
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
Contrasting effects of urbanization and fire on understory plant communities in the natural and wildland–urban interface
Year: 2023
As human populations expand and land-use change intensifies, terrestrial ecosystems experience concurrent disturbances (e.g., urbanization and fire) that may interact and compound their effects on biodiversity. In the urbanizing landscapes of the southern Appalachian region of the United States of America (US), fires in mesic forests have become more frequent in recent years. However, 80 years of forest management practices aimed at fire suppression in this region may have decreased landscape resistance or resilience to high-severity fires. At the same time, housing development is rapidly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A firebreak placement model for optimizing biodiversity protection at landscape scale
Year: 2023
A solution approach is proposed to optimize the selection of landscape cells for inclusion in firebreaks. It involves linking spatially explicit information on a landscape’s ecological values, historical ignition patterns and fire spread behavior. A firebreak placement optimization model is formulated that captures the tradeoff between the direct loss of biodiversity due to the elimination of vegetation in areas designated for placement of firebreaks and the protection provided by the firebreaks from losses due to future forest fires. The optimal solution generated by the model reduced…
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
Making choices: prioritising the protection of biodiversity in wildfires
Year: 2023
Biodiversity is in chronic decline, and extreme events – such as wildfires – can add further episodes of acute losses. Fires of increasing magnitude will often overwhelm response capacity, and decision-makers need to make choices about what to protect. Conventionally, such choices prioritise human life then infrastructure then biodiversity. Based on shortcomings revealed in the 2019–20 Australian wildfires, we propose a series of linked steps that can be used to identify and prioritise biodiversity assets (including their priority relative to other types of assets), enhance and implement…
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
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
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
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
The eco-evolutionary role of fire in shaping terrestrial ecosystems
Year: 2023
1. Fire is an inherently evolutionary process, even though much more emphasis has been given to ecological responses of plants and their associated communities to fire. 2. Here, we synthesize contributions to a Special Feature entitled ‘Fire as a dynamic ecological and evolutionary force’ and place them in a broader context of fire research. Topics covered in this Special Feature include a perspective on the im-pacts of novel fire regimes on differential forest mortality, discussions on new ap-proaches to investigate vegetation-fire feedbacks and resulting plant syndromes,…
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
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