Research Database
Displaying 221 - 240 of 315
Whither the paradigm shift? Large wildland fires and the wildfire paradox offer opportunities for a new paradigm of ecological fire management
Year: 2017
The growing frequency of large wildland fires has raised awareness of the ‘wildfire paradox’ and the ‘firefighting trap’ that are both rooted in the fire exclusion paradigm. However, a paradigm shift has been unfolding in the wildland fire community that seeks to restore fire ecology processes across broad landscapes. This would involve managing rather than aggressively suppressing large fires. Examples of recent fire science publications demonstrating ‘new paradigm’ thinking or critical questioning of ‘old paradigm’ assumptions are offered as evidence of this shift in thinking. However,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
All Lands Approaches to Fire Management in the Pacific West: A Typology
Year: 2017
Since 2009, the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service has promoted an “all lands approach” to forest restoration, particularly relevant in the context of managing wildfire. To characterize its implementation, we undertook an inventory of what we refer to as fire-focused all lands management (ALM) projects, defined as projects in which fuels reduction treatments are planned or implemented across more than one landownership to reduce wildfire risk or increase forest resilience to wildfire. We focused on regions of Washington, Oregon, and California dominated by dry, fire-prone forests and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effectiveness of public health messaging and communication channels during smoke events: A rapid systematic review
Year: 2017
Exposure to smoke emitted from wildfire and planned burns (i.e., smoke events) has been associated with numerous negative health outcomes, including respiratory symptoms and conditions. This rapid review investigates recent evidence (post-2009) regarding the effectiveness of public health messaging during smoke events. The objectives were to determine the effectiveness of various communication channels used and public health messages disseminated during smoke events, for general and at-risk populations. A search of 12 databases and grey literature yielded 1775 unique articles, of which 10…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Return on investment from fuel treatments to reduce severe wildfire and erosion in a watershed investment program in Colorado
Year: 2017
A small but growing number of watershed investment programs in the western United States focus on wildfire risk reduction to municipal water supplies. This paper used return on investment (ROI) analysis to quantify how the amounts and placement of fuel treatment interventions would reduce sediment loading to the Strontia Springs Reservoir in the Upper South Platte River watershed southwest of Denver, Colorado following an extreme fire event. We simulated various extents of fuel mitigation activities under two placement strategies: (a) a strategic treatment prioritization map and (b)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Federal fire managers’ perceptions of the importance, scarcity and substitutability of suppression resources
Year: 2017
Wildland firefighting in the United States is a complex and costly enterprise. While there are strong seasonal signatures for fire occurrence in specific regions of the United States, spatiotemporal occurrence of wildfire activity can have high inter-annual variability. Suppression resources come from a variety of jurisdictions and provide a wide range of skills, experience and associated mobility and logistical needs. Dispatch centres and regional and national resource allocation centres move suppression resources to respond to demand. However, little is known about the decision-making…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Aligning Smoke Management with Ecological and Public Health Goals
Year: 2017
Past and current forest management affects wildland fire smoke impacts on downwind human populations. However, mismatches between the scale of benefits and risks make it difficult to proactively manage wildland fires to promote both ecological and public health. Building on recent literature and advances in modeling smoke and health effects, we outline a framework to more directly quantify and compare smoke impacts based on emissions, dispersion, and the size and vulnerability of downwind populations across time and space. We apply the framework in a case study to demonstrate how different…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Century of Wildland Fire Research - Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop
Year: 2017
Although ecosystems, humans, and fire have coexisted for millennia, changes in geology, ecology, hydrology, and climate as well as sociocultural, regulatory, and economic factors have converged to make wildland fire management exceptionally challenging for U.S. federal, state, and local authorities. Given the mounting, unsustainable costs and difficulty translating existing wildland fire science into policy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a 1-day workshop to focus on how a century of wildland fire research can contribute to improving wildland fire…
Publication Type: Report
Emissions from prescribed burning of timber slash piles in Oregon
Year: 2017
Emissions from burning piles of post-harvest timber slash (Douglas-fir) in Grande Ronde, Oregon were sampled using an instrument platform lofted into the plume using a tether-controlled aerostat or balloon. Emissions of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, particulate matter (PM2.5), black carbon, ultraviolet absorbing PM, elemental/organic carbon, filter-based metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated dibenzodioxins/dibenzofurans (PCDD/PCDF), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were sampled to determine emission factors, the amount of pollutant formed per amount…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Science Core Curriculum
Year: 2017
This curriculum is designed to teach the basics of fire to non-fire-professional community members, including instructors and landowners, such as ranchers and farmers. The goal is to reduce risk and fire hazard through education and understanding.
Publication Type: Report
Review of the health effects of wildland fire smoke on wildland firefighters and the public
Year: 2016
Each year, the general public and wildland firefighters in the US are exposed to smoke from wildland fires. As part of an effort to characterize health risks of breathing this smoke, a review of the literature was conducted using five major databases, including PubMed and MEDLINE Web of Knowledge, to identify smoke components that present the highest hazard potential, the mechanisms of toxicity, review epidemiological studies for health effects and identify the current gap in knowledge on the health impacts of wildland fire smoke exposure. Respiratory events measured in time series studies as…
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
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
Local and regional smoke impacts from prescribed fires
Year: 2016
Smoke from wildfires poses a significant threat to affected communities. Prescribed burning is conducted to reduce the extent and potential damage of wildfires, but produces its own smoke threat. Planners of prescribed fires model the likely dispersion of smoke to help manage the impacts on local communities. Significant uncertainty remains about the actual smoke impact from prescribed fires, especially near the fire, and the accuracy of smoke dispersal models. To address this uncertainty, a detailed study of smoke dispersal was conducted for one small (52 ha) and one large (700 ha)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
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
Tamm Review: Are fuel treatments effective at achieving ecological and social objectives? A systematic review
Year: 2016
The prevailing paradigm in the western U.S. is that the increase in stand-replacing wildfires in historically frequent-fire dry forests is due to unnatural fuel loads that have resulted from management activities including fire suppression, logging, and grazing, combined with more severe drought conditions and increasing temperatures. To counteract unnaturally high fuel loads, fuel reduction treatments which are designed to reduce fire hazard and improve overall ecosystem functioning have been increasing over the last decade. However, until recently much of what we knew about treatment…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest fire policy: change conventional thinking of smoke management to prioritize long-term air quality and public health
Year: 2016
Wildland fire smoke is inevitable. Size and intensity of wildland fires are increasing in the western USA. Smoke-free skies and public exposure to wildland fire smoke have effectively been postponed through suppression. The historic policy of suppression has systematically both instilled a public expectation of a smoke-free environment and deferred emissions through increased forest fuel loads that will lead to an eventual large spontaneous release. High intensity fire smoke is impacting a larger area including high density urban areas. Policy change has largely attempted to provide the…
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
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