Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 63
Exploring relationships between perceived suppression capabilities and resident performance of wildfire mitigations
Year: 2022
Increased wildfire activity has led to renewed interest in enhancing local capacity to reduce wildfire risk in residential areas. Local fire departments (LFDs) are often the first responders to rural wildfires. However, LFDs may also struggle to address service demands in the growing wildland urban interface, including increasing numbers of wildfire incidents and changes in area socio-demographics (e.g., aging populations) or culture (e.g., decreasing volunteerism, new residents). We used a mixed-mode survey (n = 770) to explore rural perceptions of various fire service organizations (FSOs),…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Relationships between building features and wildfire damage in California, USA and Pedrógão Grande, Portugal
Year: 2022
Background: Buildings in communities near wildlands, in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), can experience wildfire damage.Aims: To quantitatively assess the relationship between building features and damage, a building wildfire resistance index is developed and validated with the 2013–2017 CAL FIRE (DINS) database from California, USA, and the 2017 Pedrógão Grande Fire Complex post-fire investigation from Portugal.Methods: Three statistical dependence tests are compared to evaluate the relationship between selected building features and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human ignitions on private lands drive USFS cross‑boundary wildfire transmission and community impacts in the western US
Year: 2022
Wildfires in the western United States (US) are increasingly expensive, destructive, and deadly. Reducing wildfire losses is particularly challenging when fires frequently start on one land tenure and damage natural or developed assets on other ownerships. Managing wildfire risk in multijurisdictional landscapes has recently become a centerpiece of wildfire strategic planning, legislation, and risk research. However, important empirical knowledge gaps remain regarding cross-boundary fire activity in the western US. Here, we use lands administered by the US Forest Service as a study system to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating rural Pacific Northwest towns for wildfire evacuation vulnerability
Year: 2021
Wildfire is an annual threat for many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. In some severe events, evacuation is one potential course of action to gain safety from an advancing wildfire. Since most evacuations occur in a personal vehicle along the surrounding road network, the quality of this network is a critical component of a community's vulnerability to wildfire. In this paper, we leverage a high-resolution spatial dataset of wildfire burn probability and mean fireline intensity to conduct a regional-scale screening of wildfire evacuation vulnerability…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Stop going around in circles: towards a reconceptualisation of disaster risk management phases
Year: 2021
Purpose The way that disasters are managed, or indeed mis-managed, is often represented diagrammatically as a “disaster cycle”. The cyclical aspects of the disaster (risk) management concept, comprised of numerous operational phases, have, in recent years, been criticised for conceptualising and representing disasters in an overly simplistic way that typically starts with a disaster “event” – and subsequently leads onto yet another disaster. Such cyclical thinking has been proven to not be very useful for the complexities associated with understanding disasters and their risks. This paper…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The 1994 Eastside screens large-tree harvest limit: review of science relevant to forest planning 25 years later
Year: 2020
In 1994, a large-tree harvest standard known as the “21-inch rule” was appliedto land and resource management plans of national forests in eastern Oregon andWashington (hereafter, the “east side”) to halt the loss of large, old, live, and deadtrees and old forest patches. These trees and forest patches have distinct ecological,economic, and social values, as reflected in widespread fish and wildlife use,public support for protecting them, and commercial interest in harvesting them,thus they have been the topic of much discussion and debate. At the request ofregional Forest Service managers,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tribes & Climate Change
Year: 2020
Native Americans rely on tribally important ecosystem services such as traditional foods, hunting, timber production, non-timber forest resources (recreation, water), and cultural resources. Unfortunately, many of these resources may be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A research team sought to answer the question: Where and which tribally-important ecosystem services will be affected by climate change in the Pacific Northwest? They used projections from climate and vegetation models and stakeholder input to demonstrate a generalizable approach for assessing possible…
Publication Type: Web project page
Social Vulnerability and Wildfire in the Wildland-Urban Interface - Annotated Bibliography
Year: 2019
Publication Type: Report
Using mental models to understand trade-offs in wildfire risk mitigation
Year: 2019
Throughout much of the Pacific Northwest, the interplay between environmental and social change not only contributes to wildfire risk, but also complicates efforts to mitigate it. As fire-prone landscapes become increasingly economically and culturally diverse, wildfire risk mitigation decisions have implications for a correspondingly broader set of values, resulting in greater potential for trade-offs (that is, actions that enhance some values but adversely affect others)....
Publication Type: Report
Social Vulnerability and Wildfire in the Wildland-Urban Interface: Literature synthesis
Year: 2019
The overall objective of this paper is to clarify areas of debate, clearly define and contrast disparate approaches, and synthesize findings that may help address vulnerability to wildfires and other natural hazards. While land managers and fire personnel might find it pertinent to approach biophysical and social issues separately, addressing both aspects of wildfire hazard can be productive for minimizing risk and empowering communities, neighborhoods, and households to prepare and recover from wildfire events. We aim to provide a practical grasp of social vulnerability research as it…
Publication Type: Report
Social Vulnerability and Wildfire in the Wildland-Urban Interface
Year: 2019
People living in the Pacific Northwest confrontrisks associated with environmentalhazards such as wildfire. Vulnerability towildfire hazard is commonly recognized as beingspatially distributed according to geographic conditionsthat collectively determine the probabilityof exposure. For example, exposure to wildfirehazard is higher for people living in rural, forestedsettings than in a strictly urban neighborhood becauserural housing is built in close proximity tothe threat source, e.g., flammable landscapes suchas forests and chaparral. Yet, even if levels of exposureare held constant, not…
Publication Type: Report
Influences of fire–vegetation feedbacks and post‐fire recovery rates on forest landscape vulnerability to altered fire regimes
Year: 2018
In the context of ongoing climatic warming, forest landscapes face increasing risk of conversion to non‐forest vegetation through alteration of their fire regimes and their post‐fire recovery dynamics. However, this pressure could be amplified or dampened, depending on how fire‐driven changes to vegetation feed back to alter the extent or behaviour of subsequent fires. Here we develop a mathematical model to formalize understanding of how fire–vegetation feedbacks and the time to forest recovery following high‐severity (i.e. stand‐replacing) fire affect the extent and stability of forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing vulnerabilities and adapting to climate change in northwestern U.S. forests
Year: 2017
Multiple climate change vulnerability assessments in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA provide the scientific information needed to begin adaptation in forested landscapes. Adaptation options developed by resource managers in conjunction with these assessments, newly summarized in the Climate Change Adaptation Library of the Western United States, provide an extensive choice of peer-reviewed climate-smart management strategies and tactics. More adaptation options are available for vegetation than for any other resource category, allowing vegetation management to be applied across a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Who among the elderly is most vulnerable to exposure and health risks of PM2.5 from wildfire smoke?
Year: 2017
Wildfires burn over 7 million US acres annually, according to the US Forest Service. Little is known regarding which subpopulations are more vulnerable to health risks from wildfire smoke, including fine particles. We estimated exposure to fine particles specifically from wildfires and associations between wildfire-specific fine particles and respiratory hospital admissions for subpopulations > 65 years in the Western US (2004-2009). Higher fractions of Blacks and people in urban counties and in California are exposed to > 1 smoke wave (high-pollution episodes from wildfire smoke)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing Landscape Vulnerability to Wildfire in the USA
Year: 2016
Wildfire is an ever present, natural process shaping landscapes. Having the ability to accurately measure and predict wildfire occurrence and impacts to ecosystem goods and services, both retrospectively and prospectively, is critical for adaptive management of landscapes. Landscape vulnerability is a concept widely utilized in the ecosystem management literature that has not been explicitly defined, particularly with regard to wildfire. Vulnerability more broadly is defined by three primary components: exposure to the stressor, sensitivity to a range of stressor variability, and resilience…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community wildfire preparedness: a global state-of-the-knowledge summary of social science research
Year: 2015
This article builds on findings from a synthesis of fire social science research that was published from 2000 to 2010 to understand what has been learned more recently about public response to wildfires. Two notable changes were immediately noted in the fairly substantial number of articles published between 2011 and 2014. First, while over 90% of the articles found in the initial synthesis were US-based studies, roughly half of the articles published since 2010 have been conducted outside the USA, the majority from Australia. Second, while the primary focus of earlier studies was on pre-fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Defining extreme wildland fires using geospatial and ancillary metrics
Year: 2014
There is a growing professional and public perception that ‘extreme’ wildland fires are becoming more common due to changing climatic conditions. This concern is heightened in the wildland–urban interface where social and ecological effects converge. ‘Mega-fires’, ‘conflagrations’, ‘extreme’ and ‘catastrophic’ are descriptors interchangeably used increasingly to describe fires in recent decades in the US and globally. It is necessary to have consistent, meaningful and quantitative metrics to define these perceived ‘extreme’ fires, given studies predict an increased frequency of large and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing social vulnerability to climate change in human communities near public forests and grasslands: A framework for resource managers and planners
Year: 2013
Public land management agencies have incorporated the concept of vulnerability into protocols for assessing and planning for climate change impacts on public forests and grasslands. However, resource managers and planners have little guidance for how to address the social aspects of vulnerability in these assessments and plans. Failure to assess social vulnerability to climate change during management planning could compromise land management agencies’ adaptation strategies as well as public support for these strategies. We provide a framework for understanding and assessing social…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Reducing hazardous fuels on nonindustrial private forests: factors influencing landowner decisions
Year: 2011
In mixed-ownership landscapes, fuels conditions on private lands have implications for fire risk on public lands and vice versa. The success of efforts to mitigate fire risk depends on the extent, efficacy, and coordination of treatments on nearby ownerships. Understanding factors in forest owners’ decisions to address the risk of wildland fire is therefore important. This research uses logistic regression to analyze mail survey data and identify factors in forest owners’ decisions to reduce hazardous fuels in the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) ecosystem on the east side of Oregon. Results…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Reducing Fire Risk on Your Forest Property
Year: 2010
Whether you own a few acres or thousands, this publication will help you reduce the potential for wildfire damage on your property while improving overall forest health and wildlife habitat. Although these actions won’t prevent a wildfire from coming onto your property, they can make it more fire resistant. In other words, by following the guidelines in this publication you can reduce a fire’s severity so that most trees survive and firefighters are better able to attack and extinguish the blaze. While this publication provides suggestions for making your property more fire-resistant, it does…
Publication Type: Report