Research Database
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2
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
The missing fire: quantifying human exclusion of wildfire in Pacific Northwest forests, USA
Year: 2019
Western U.S. wildfire area burned has increased dramatically over the last half‐century. How contemporary extent and severity of wildfires compare to the pre‐settlement patterns to which ecosystems are adapted is debated. We compared large wildfires in Pacific Northwest forests from 1984 to 2015 to modeled historic fire regimes. Despite late twentieth‐century increases in area burned, we show that Pacific Northwest forests have experienced an order of magnitude less fire over 32 yr than expected under historic fire regimes. Within fires that have burned, severity distributions are…
Publication Type: Journal Article