Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 77
Quantifying wildland fire resources deployed during the compound threat of COVID-19
Year: 2024
Fire agencies across the United States must make complex resource allocation decisions to manage wildfires using a national network of shared firefighting resources. Firefighters play a critical role in suppressing fires and protecting vulnerable communities. However, they are exposed to health and safety risks associated with fire, smoke inhalation, and infectious disease transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic further complicated these risks, prompting fire agencies to propose resource management adaptations to minimize COVID-19 exposure and transmission. It is unclear if and how the pandemic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors influencing wildfire management decisions after the 2009 US federal policy update
Year: 2024
Background
The decision making process undertaken during wildfire responses is complex and prone to uncertainty. In the US, decisions federal land managers make are influenced by numerous and often competing factors.
Aims
To assess and validate the presence of decision factors relevant to the wildfire decision making context that were previously known and to identify those that have emerged since the US federal wildfire policy was updated in 2009.
Methods
Interviews were conducted across the US while wildfires were actively burning to elucidate time-of-fire decision factors. Data…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Preliminary Case Study on the Compounding Effects of Local Emissions and Upstream Wildfires on Urban Air Pollution
Year: 2024
Interactions between urban and wildfire pollution emissions are active areas of research, with numerous aircraft field campaigns and satellite analyses of wildfire pollution being conducted in recent years. Several studies have found that elevated ozone and particulate pollution levels are both generally associated with wildfire smoke in urban areas. We measured pollutant concentrations at two Utah Division of Air Quality regulatory air quality observation sites and a local hot spot (a COVID-19 testing site) within a 48 h period of increasing wildfire smoke impacts that occurred in Salt Lake…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Peoples' Rights Discourse: Toward Hemispheric Indigenous Climate and Environmental Justice
Year: 2024
In the face of global climate change, Indigenous communities around the world have increasingly gained recognition as significant actors in the fight for environmental justice and sustainability. This paper endeavors to explore the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews and environmental stewardship, while gesturing toward international policies rooted in both state apparatus and in indigenous grassroots efforts. Collectively, this work seeks to illuminate the action, implementation, and community work done by Indigenous Peoples that Hernandez [Binnizá & Maya Ch’orti’] (2022…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Limited availability of health risk communication related to community smoke exposure from prescribed burns in the United States: a review
Year: 2024
Prescribed burns are used to maintain wildland ecosystems and decrease fuel loads and associated wildfire hazard. Prescribed burns may produce enough smoke to cause adverse health outcomes. The aim of this review is to understand what communication materials exist for disseminating health risk information related to prescribed burn smoke and challenges to developing such communication. We examined United States peer-reviewed literature from PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases and conducted an environmental scan of grey literature including materials from federal, and several US state…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mortality Burden From Wildfire Smoke Under Climate Change
Year: 2024
Wildfire activity has increased in the US and is projected to accelerate under future climate change. However, our understanding of the impacts of climate change on wildfire smoke and health remains highly uncertain. We quantify the past and future mortality burden in the US due to wildfire smoke fine particulate matter (PM2.5). We construct an ensemble of statistical and machine learning models that link variation in climate to wildfire smoke PM2.5, and empirically estimate smoke PM2.5-mortality relationships using georeferenced data on all recorded deaths in the US from 2006 to 2019. We…
Publication Type: Report
Wildfire Smoke Exposure and Incident Dementia
Year: 2024
Importance: Long-term exposure to total fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a recognized dementia risk factor, but less is known about wildfire-generated PM2.5, an increasingly common PM2.5 source. Objective: To assess the association between long-term wildfire and nonwildfire PM2.5 exposure and risk of incident dementia. Design, Setting, and Participants: This open cohort study was conducted using January 2008 to December 2019 electronic health record (EHR) data among members of Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC), which serves…
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
A model for rapid PM2.5 exposure estimates in wildfire conditions using routinely available data: rapidfire v0.1.3
Year: 2024
Urban smoke exposure events from large wildfires have become increasingly common in California and throughout the western United States. The ability to study the impacts of high smoke aerosol exposures from these events on the public is limited by the availability of high-quality, spatially resolved estimates of aerosol concentrations. Methods for assigning aerosol exposure often employ multiple data sets that are time-consuming to create and difficult to reproduce. As these events have gone from occasional to nearly annual in frequency, the need for rapid smoke exposure assessments has…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Clearing the air: evaluating institutions’ social media health messaging on wildfire and smoke risks in the US Pacific Northwest
Year: 2024
BackgroundWildfire smoke contributes substantially to the global disease burden and is a major cause of air pollution in the US states of Oregon and Washington. Climate change is expected to bring more wildfires to this region. Social media is a popular platform for health promotion and a need exists for effective communication about smoke risks and mitigation measures to educate citizens and safeguard public health.MethodsUsing a sample of 1,287 Tweets from 2022, we aimed to analyze temporal Tweeting patterns in relation to potential smoke exposure and evaluate and compare institutions’ use…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managed burning of forests: Balancing economic incentives, risks, and liability
Year: 2024
Managed burning of forests can provide benefits to society including mitigated wildfire risk, improved habitat, and more. However, adverse outcomes of escaped fire or smoke pose risks. I reviewed the evolution of the law regulating forest management burns, explored the current legal architecture, and analyzed the economic incentives for involved actors, in order to identify policy options. Liability standards through most of the twentieth century increasingly placed risk burden on landowners and burners, but increased recognition of the benefits of burns led many States to reverse this trend…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metals in Wildfire Suppressants
Year: 2024
Frequent and severe wildfires have led to increased application of fire suppression products (long-term fire retardants, water enhancers, and Class A foams) in the American West. While fire suppressing products used on wildfires must be approved by theU.S. Forest Service, portions of their formulations are trade secrets.Increased metals content in soils and surface waters at the wildland-urban interface has been observed after wildfires but has primarily been attributed to ash deposition or anthropogenic impact from nearby urban areas. In this study, metal concentrations in several fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Realignment of federal environmental policies to recognize fire’s role
Year: 2024
BackgroundEnactment of the Clean Air Act (CAA), Endangered Species Act (ESA), and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), three of the primary federal environmental laws, all coincided with the height of fire suppression and exclusion in the United States. These laws fail to acknowledge or account for the importance of fire in many fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems, particularly in the American west, or the imperative for fire restoration to improve resiliency and reduce wildfire risk as identified by western science and Indigenous knowledge. We review the statutory and regulatory…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mortality attributable to PM 2.5 from wildland fires inCalifornia from 2008 to 2018
Year: 2024
In California, wildfire risk and severity have grown substantially in the last several decades. Research has characterized extensive adverse health impacts from exposure to wildfire-attributable fine particulate matter (PM2.5), but few studies have quantified long-term outcomes, and none have used a wildfire-specific chronic dose-response mortality coefficient. Here, we quantified the mortality burden for PM2.5 exposure from California fires from 2008 to 2018 using Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system wildland fire PM2.5 estimates. We used a concentration-response function for PM2…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating the potential role of federal air quality standards in constraining applications of prescribed fire in the western United States
Year: 2023
Prescribed fire is a useful tool for building resilient landscapes in fire-prone areas across the globe. In the western U.S., prescribed fire is employed by federal, state, and Tribal land managers and planned during particular meteorological and air quality conditions to manage air quality impacts. As agencies prepare to plan and permit more prescribed fire, an ongoing question will be whether existing air quality conditions constrain the potential for more prescribed fire. We performed a set of spatial and statistical analyses to evaluate how prescribed burns are potentially constrained by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Environmental justice analysis of wildfire-related PM2.5 exposure using low-cost sensors in California
Year: 2023
Highlights • Wildfire may exacerbate health disparities & environmental justice concerns. • Low-cost PM2.5 sensors improve wildfire impact assessment. • Increases in PM2.5 correlate with wildfire activity (within 30 km). • Indoor increases in PM2.5 concentrations mimic outdoor PM2.5 increase patterns. The increasing number and severity of wildfires is negatively impacting air quality for millions of California residents each year. Community exposure to PM2.5 in two main population centers (San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles County area) was assessed using the low-cost PurpleAir sensor…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metal toxin threat in wildland fires determined by geology and fire severity
Year: 2023
Accentuated by climate change, catastrophic wildfires are a growing, distributed global public health risk from inhalation of smoke and dust. Underrecognized, however, are the health threats arising from fire-altered toxic metals natural to soils and plants. Here, we demonstrate that high temperatures during California wildfires catalyzed widespread transformation of chromium to its carcinogenic form in soil and ash, as hexavalent chromium, particularly in areas with metal-rich geologies (e.g., serpentinite). In wildfire ash, we observed dangerous levels (327-13,100 µg kg−1) of reactive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed Burns as a Tool to Mitigate Future Wildfire Smoke Exposure: Lessons for States and Rural Environmental Justice Communities
Year: 2023
Smoke from wildfires presents one of the greatest threats to air quality, public health, and ecosystems in the United States, especially in the West. Here we quantify the efficacy of prescribed burning as an intervention for mitigating smoke exposure downwind of wildfires across the West during the 2018 and 2020 fire seasons. Using the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model, we calculate the sensitivities of population-weighted smoke concentrations in receptor regions, including states and rural environmental justice communities, to fire emissions upwind of the receptors. We find…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social Vulnerability in USCommunities Affected by WildfireSmoke, 2011 to 2021
Year: 2023
Objectives. To describe demographic and social characteristics of US communities exposed to wildfire smoke.
Methods. Using satellite-collected data on wildfire smoke with the locations of population centers in the coterminous United States, we identified communities potentially exposed to light-, medium-, and heavy-density smoke plumes for each day from 2011 to 2021. We linked days of exposure to smoke in each category of smoke plume density with 2010 US Census data and community characteristics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index to describe…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of smoke modelling tools used to mitigate air quality impacts from prescribed burning
Year: 2023
Background. Prescribed fire is a land management tool used extensively across the United States. Owing to health and safety risks, smoke emitted by burns requires appropriate manage- ment. Smoke modelling tools are often used to mitigate air pollution impacts. However, direct comparisons of tools’ predictions are lacking. Aims. We compared three tools commonly used to plan prescribed burning projects: the Simple Smoke Screening Tool, VSmoke and HYSPLIT. Methods. We used each tool to model smoke dispersion from prescribed burns conducted by the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation…
Publication Type: Journal Article