Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 44
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
A roadmap for pyrodiversity science
Year: 2023
Background
Contemporary and projected shifts in global fire regimes highlight the importance of understanding how fire affects ecosystem function and biodiversity across taxa and geographies. Pyrodiversity, or heterogeneity in fire history, is often an important driver of biodiversity, though it has been largely overlooked until relatively recently. In this paper, we synthesise previous research to develop a theoretical framework on pyrodiversity–biodiversity relationships and propose future research and conservation management directions.
Theoretical Framework
Pyrodiversity may affect…
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 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
Rapid fuel recovery after stand-replacing fire in closed-cone pine forests and implications for short-interval severe reburns
Year: 2023
Accelerating disturbance activity under a warming climate increases the potential for multiple disturbances to overlap and produce compound effects that erode ecosystem resilience — the capacity to experience disturbance without transitioning to an alternative state. A key concern is the potential for amplifying or attenuating feedbacks via interactions among successive, linked disturbance events. Following severe wildfires, fuel limitation is a negative feedback that may reduce the likelihood of subsequent fire. However, the duration of, and pre-fire vegetation effects on fuel limitation…
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
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
How Does Fire Suppression Alter the Wildfire Regime? A Systematic Review
Year: 2023
Fire suppression has become a fundamental approach for shaping contemporary wildfire regimes. However, a growing body of research suggests that aggressive fire suppression can increase high-intensity wildfires, creating the wildfire paradox. Whether the strategy always triggers the paradox remains a topic of ongoing debate. The role of fire suppression in altering wildfire regimes in diverse socio-ecological systems and associated research designs demands a deeper understanding. To reconcile these controversies and synthesize the existing knowledge, a systematic review has been conducted to…
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
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
Using PODs to integrate fire and fuels planning
Year: 2023
BackgroundPotential Wildfire Operational Delineations (PODs) were developed as a pre-season planning tool to promote safe and effective fire response. Past research on PODs has identified uses in an incident management context. There has been little research on how PODs are being utilised in non-incident management contexts to align forest and wildfire planning objectives.AimsWe sought to understand how actors are adopting and adapting the PODs framework to inform non-incident management, and to identify facilitators, barriers and recommendations.…
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Homeowner firewise behaviors in fire-prone central Oregon: An exploration of the attitudinal, situational, and cultural worldviews impacting pre-fire mitigation actions
Year: 2023
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. In order to mitigate the effects of this growing threat, fire management agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service have encouraged residents in at-risk communities to protect their homes, property, and communities by adopting Firewise recommendations. Using a survey of wildland-urban interface (WUI) homeowners in fire-prone Deschutes County, Oregon, this study examines homeowners' participation in Firewise activities. While the majority…
Publication Type: Journal Article