Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 89
A Quantitative Analysis of Firefighter Availability and Prescribed Burning in the Okanogan–Wenatchee National Forest
Year: 2025
Wildfire activity in the western United States has been on the rise since the mid-1980s, with longer, higher-risk fire seasons projected for the future. Prescribed burning mitigates the risk of extreme wildfire events, but such treatments are currently underutilized. Fire managers have cited lack of firefighter availability as a key barrier to prescribed burning. We use both principal component analysis (PCA) and logistic regression modeling methodologies to investigate whether or not (and if yes, under what conditions) personnel shortages on a given day are associated with lower odds of a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing Hydroclimatic Whiplash Can Amplify Wildfire Risk in a Warming Climate
Year: 2025
On January 7 and 8, 2025, a series of wind-driven wildfires occurred in Los Angeles County in Southern California. Two of these fires ignited in dense woody chaparral shrubland and immediately burned into adjacent populated areas–the Palisades Fire on the coastal slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Eaton fire in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Both fires ultimately eclipsed the traditionally-defined “wildland-urban interface” boundaries by burning structure-to-structure as an urban conflagration. The scope of the devastation is staggering; at the time of writing, the…
Publication Type: Report
Decreasing frequency of low and moderate fire weather days may be contributing to large wildfire occurrence in the northern Sierra Nevada
Year: 2025
Previous analyses identified large-scale climatic patterns contributing to greater fuel aridity as drivers of recent dramatic increases in wildfire activity throughout California. This study revisits an approach to investigate more local fire weather patterns in the northern Sierra Nevada; a region within California that has experienced exceptionally high wildfire activity recently. The annual percentages of fire season days above 90th and 95th percentile Energy Release Component (ERC) values were very low prior to 1994 (Fig. 3). Since 1994, years with noticeable percentages of exceedances (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mobile radar provides insights into hydrologic responses in burn areas
Year: 2025
Background. Wildfires often occur in mountainous terrain, regions that pose substantial challenges to operational meteorological and hydrologic observing networks. Aims. A mobile, postfire hydrometeorological observatory comprising remote-sensing and in situ instrumentation was developed and deployed in a burnt area to provide unique insights into rainfall-induced post-fire hazards. Methods. Mobile radar-based rainfall estimates were produced throughout the burn area at 75-m resolution and compared with rain gauge accumulations and basin response variables. Key results. The mobile radar was…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Lightning ignition efficiency in Canadian forests
Year: 2025
Background: Lightning-caused fires have a driving influence on Canadian forests, being responsible for approximately half of all wildfires and 90% of the area burned. We created a climatology (2000–2020) of daily lightning efficiency (i.e., the ratio of cloud-to-ground lightning flashes to lightning-caused wildfires that occurred) over the meteorological summer for four ecozones and a subset of British Columbia (BC) ecoprovinces. We estimated lightning efficiency using data from the Canadian Lightning Detection Network and the Canadian National Fire Database. We used the ERA5…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governance of Indigenous data in open earth systems science
Year: 2025
In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights? The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), convened to address this question and envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research. Using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) as an example, the EDRWG recommends actions, applicable across all phases of the data lifecycle, that recognize the sovereign rights of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Influence of Time‐Averaging of Climate Data on Estimates of Atmospheric Vapor Pressure Deficit and Inferred Relationships With Wildfire Area in the Western United States
Year: 2025
Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a driver of evaporative demand and correlates strongly with wildfire extent in the western United States (WUS). Vapor pressure deficit is the difference between saturation vapor pressure (es) and actual vapor pressure (ea). Because es increases nonlinearly with temperature, calculations of time‐averaged VPD vary depending on the frequency of temperature measurements and how ea is calculated, potentially limiting our understanding of fire‐climate relationships. We calculate eight versions of monthly VPD across the WUS and assess their differences. Monthly VPDs…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Canada Under Fire – Drivers and Impacts of the Record-Breaking 2023 Wildfire Season
Year: 2024
The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity. Spanning from late April to early November and extending across much of the forested regions of Canada, the season resulted in a record-breaking total area burned of approximately 15 million hectares, over seven times the historic national annual average. The impacts were profound with more than 200 communities evacuated (approximately 232,000 people), periods of dense smoke that caused significant public health concerns, and unprecedented demands on fire-fighting resources. The exceptional area burned can be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Probabilistic Forecasting of Lightning Strikes over the Continental USA and Alaska: Model Development and Verification
Year: 2024
Lightning is responsible for the most area annually burned by wildfires in the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere. Hence, predicting the occurrence of wildfires requires reliable forecasting of the chance of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes during storms. Here, we describe the development and verification of a probabilistic lightning-strike algorithm running on a uniform 20 km grid over the continental USA and Alaska. This is the first and only high-resolution lightning forecasting model for North America derived from 29-year-long data records. The algorithm consists of a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-contact Indigenous fire stewardship: a research framework and application to a Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest
Year: 2024
Fire is a key disturbance process that shapes the structure and function of montane temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Recent research is revealing more frequent historical fire activity in the western central Cascades than expected by conventional theory. Indigenous peoples have lived in the PNW for millennia. However, Indigenous people's roles in shaping vegetation mosaics in montane temperate forests of the PNW has been overlooked, despite archaeological evidence of long-term, continuous human use of these landscapes. In this paper, we present a generalizable research…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire Research
Year: 2024
Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories. In short, our Peoples have always been data gatherers, and as this article presents, we are also fire data gatherers and stewards. Given the growing interest in fire research with Indigenous communities, there is an opportunity for guidance on data collection conducted equitably and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Future fire events are likely to be worse than climate projections indicate – these are some of the reasons why
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate projections signal longer fire seasons and an increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days for much of the world including Australia.AimsHere we argue that heatwaves, dynamic fire–atmosphere interactions and increased fuel availability caused by drought will amplify potential fire behaviour well beyond projections based on calculations of afternoon forest fire danger derived from climate models.MethodsWe review meteorological dynamics contributing to enhanced fire behaviour during heatwaves, drawing on examples of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity
Year: 2024
Pyrodiversity (temporally and spatially diverse fire histories) is thought to promote biodiversity by increasing environmental heterogeneity and replicating Indigenous fire regimes, yet studies of pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships from areas under active Indigenous fire stewardship are rare. Here, we explored whether Indigenous pyrodiversity promoted plant richness and diversity in an arid ecosystem from north-western Australia. We selected landscapes that ranged from highly pyrodiverse and under active Indigenous burning to more coarse-scale and less diverse mosaics under lightning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate resilience through ecocultural stewardship
Year: 2024
The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity. While there are many concepts of social and ecological resilience, the exemplar practices of Indigenous stewardship are recognized in having sustained Indigenous peoples and their countries for millennia and past climate change events. California has been at the crossroads of many of these issues, and the historic and current contributions of Indigenous peoples to addressing these provide an excellent study of ecocultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Drought triggers and sustains overnight fires in North America
Year: 2024
Overnight fires are emerging in North America with previously unknown drivers and implications. This notable phenomenon challenges the traditional understanding of the ‘active day, quiet night’ model of the diurnal fire cycle1,2,3 and current fire management practices4,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Hydrometeorology-wildfire relationship analysis based on a wildfire bivariate probabilistic framework in different ecoregions of the continental United States
Year: 2024
Wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystem in the U.S.. It is vital to classify wildfires using a comprehensive approach that simultaneously considers wildfire activity (the number of wildfires) and burned area. On this basis, the influence of hydrometeorological variables on wildfires can be further analyzed. Therefore, this study first classified wildfire types using a wildfire bivariate probability framework. Then, by considering six hydrometeorological variables, the dominant hydrometeorological variables for different wildfire types in 17 ecoregions of the United States were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Boundary spanners catalyze cultural and prescribed fire in western Canada
Year: 2024
Western Canada is increasingly experiencing impactful and complex wildfire seasons. In response, there are urgent calls to implement prescribed and cultural fire as a key solution to this complex challenge. Unfortunately, there has been limited investment in individuals and organizations that can navigate this complexity and work to implement collaborative solutions across physical, cognitive, and social boundaries. In the wildfire context, these boundaries manifest as jurisdictional silos, a lack of respect for certain forms of knowledge, and a disconnect between knowledge and practice. Here…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cooperative Community Wildfire Response: Pathways to First Nations’ leadership and partnership in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2024
With the growing scale of wildfires, many First Nations are demanding a stronger role in wildfire response. Disproportionate impacts on Indigenous communities (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) in Canada are motivating these demands: although approximately 5% of the population identifies as Indigenous, about 42% of wildfire evacuation events occur communities that are more than half Indigenous. In what is now known as British Columbia, Canada, new pathways for cooperative wildfire response between First Nations and provincial agencies are emerging. Drawing from semi-structured…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Comparing ground-based lightning detection networks near wildfire points-of-origin
Year: 2024
Lightning detection and attribution to wildfire ignitions is a critical component of fire management worldwide to both reduce hazards of wildfire to values-at-risk and to enhance the potential for wildland fire to provide resource benefits in fire-adapted ecosystems. We compared two operational ground-based lightning detection networks used by fire managers to identify cloud-to-ground strokes within operationally-relevant distances (1.6 km) of the origins of 4408 western United States lightning-ignited wildfires spanning May–September 2020. Applying two sets of constraints–varying…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How bureaucracies interact with Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS): a conceptual framework
Year: 2024
BackgroundIndigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS) is contested within settler-colonial contexts, where its development is shaped by complex and dynamic socio-cultural, legal, and political factors. This manuscript draws from the policy sciences to sketch out a “zone of interaction” between IFS and the state’s wildfire policy system. Drawing from the strategies of bureaucracies, our goal is to illustrate the patterns in this “zone of interaction,” and to identify the implications for IFS, as well as for Indigenous Peoples and landscapes.ResultsDrawing insights from the Australian and Canadian…
Publication Type: Journal Article