Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 182
Burning from the ground up: the structure and impact of Prescribed Burn Associations in the United States
Year: 2025
Background: To combat losses and threats from fire exclusion and extreme wildfire events, communities in the United States are increasingly self-organizing through locally led Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) to plan and implement prescribed burns on private lands.Aim: Our study aimed to document the expansion of PBAs and provide insight into their structure, function, and impacts.Methods: Leaders from 135 known PBAs across the United States were invited to participate in an online survey.Key results: Survey results demonstrate a widespread emergence of PBAs in the United States,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Role of Forensic Anthropology in the Search and Recovery of Fatal Wildland Fire Victims
Year: 2025
The search and recovery process of fatal fire victims is one of the greatest challenges in forensic anthropology, especially in large-scale wildland fire disasters. Burned human remains can exhibit significant variation in their degree of preservation depending on the temperature of the fire, the length of exposure to the heat source, and intrinsic characteristics of the victim (e.g., body size, age, and bone density). Wildland fire victims typically exhibit characteristics of the final stages of burning (i.e., nearly complete to complete calcination). The search for burned human remains is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Roof renewal disparities widen the equity gap in residential wildfire protection
Year: 2025
Wildfires are having disproportionate impacts on U.S. households. Notably, in California, over half of wildfire-destroyed homes (54%) are in low-income areas. We investigate the relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire community preparedness using building permits from 16 counties in California with 2.9 million buildings (2013–2021) and the U.S. government’s designation of disadvantaged communities (DACs), which classifies a census tract as a DAC if it meets a threshold for certain burdens, such as climate, environmental, and socio-economic. Homes located in DACs are 29% more…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High fire hazard Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) residences in California lack voluntary and mandated wildfire risk mitigation compliance in Home Ignition Zones
Year: 2025
Wildfire structure losses are increasing globally and particularly in California, USA. Losses can be mitigated in part by changes to the Home Ignition Zone (HIZ), including both home hardening and defensible space. In the United States, there are local, nation-wide, and industry-based home mitigation standards that are enforced or recommended. We explore the standards implementation (California code and two voluntary standards) at 176 participating residences in three Santa Cruz Mountains and two Sierra Nevada Mountains sites. Overall most residences had little compulsory or recommended…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Integrated fire management as an adaptation and mitigation strategy to altered fire regimes
Year: 2025
Altered fire regimes are a global challenge, increasingly exacerbated by climate change, which modifies fire weather and prolongs fire seasons. These changing conditions heighten the vulnerability of ecosystems and human populations to the impacts of wildfires on the environment, society, and the economy. The rapid pace of these changes exposes significant gaps in knowledge, tools, technology, and governance structures needed to adopt informed, holistic approaches to fire management that address both current and future challenges. Integrated Fire Management is an approach that combines fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping Community Capacity to Reduce Vulnerability to Wildfire in Colorado, USA
Year: 2025
Communities can face significant risk from wildfire, often compounded by climate change and legacies of industrial forest management. Policies and collaborative approaches for managing wildfire risk have evolved to include greater roles and responsibilities for these communities, yet local communities often lack the capacity to plan and implement actions to reduce risk of, respond to, and recover from wildfire. In this paper, we explore spatial patterns of local capacity relative to wildfire risk across the state of Colorado, USA, with the aim of informing efforts to reduce vulnerability.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion quadruple the likelihood of extreme-impact wildfires in California
Year: 2025
Previous research has examined individual factors contributing to wildfire risk, but the compounding effects of these factors remain underexplored. Here, we introduce the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI)” to quantify the compounding effects of fire-weather intensification and anthropogenic factors—including ignitions and human settlement into wildland—on wildfire risk. While climatic trends increased the frequency of high-risk fire-weather by 2.5-fold, the combination of this trend with wildland-urban interface expansion led to a 4.1-fold increase in the frequency of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mental health risk for wildland firefighters: a review and future directions
Year: 2025
Wildland fire is increasingly a consequence of the climate crisis, with growing impacts on communities and individuals. Wildland firefighters are critical to the successful management of wildland fire, yet very limited research has considered mental health in this population. Although a wealth of research in mental health risk and associated risk and protective factors exists for structural firefighters, unique demands of wildland firefighting such as the seasonal nature of work, the length and intensity of shifts, and the often geographically isolated working conditions, among other factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Improving social resilience to forest fire from community perspective
Year: 2024
Recently, terms like social and community resilience have provided new ideas in reducing disaster risks especially in forest fire. However, a comprehensive and in-depth review of community social resilience concerning forest fires is lacking. There is little research investigate whether certain social or community resilience factors can initiate forest fires or whether forest fire prevention positively be influenced by them. To fill this gap, this paper aims to identify and discuss the factors influencing the occurrence of forest fires in the scope of community social resilience. It also…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial and temporal analysis of vulnerability disparity of minorities to wildfires in California
Year: 2024
Wildfires typically have devastating impacts on communities, both in urban and rural areas, resulting in property loss, psychological distress, physical injuries, and loss of life. A notable gap in the literature is the spatial and temporal disproportionate impact of wildfires on underrepresented communities. This lack of attention is concerning, as these underrepresented populations are likely to be more vulnerable to the devastating consequences of wildfire disasters, exacerbating pre-existing social, economic, and environmental disparities. This study aims to address this gap by conducting…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical pyrodiversity in Douglas-fir forests of the southern Cascades of Oregon, USA
Year: 2024
Our understanding of forest dynamics and successional pathways in coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var menziesii) forests with relatively frequent mixed-severity fires is limited by a lack of annually precise dendroecological reconstructions that combine records of historical fires and tree establishment. The processes by which old-forest heterogeneity developed under historical fire regimes with recurrent low- and moderate-severity fires has not been well studied at fine temporal scales and across spatial scales. We developed crossdated multi-century records of fire and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring spatial heterogeneity in synergistic effects of compound climate hazards: Extreme heat and wildfire smoke on cardiorespiratory hospitalizations in California
Year: 2024
Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are increasingly co-occurring in the context of climate change, especially in California. Extreme heat and wildfire smoke may have synergistic effects on population health that vary over space. We leveraged high-resolution satellite and monitoring data to quantify spatially varying compound exposures to extreme heat and wildfire smoke in California (2006–2019) at ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) level. We found synergistic effects between extreme heat and wildfire smoke on daily cardiorespiratory hospitalizations at the state level. We also found spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing Conservation Readiness: The Where, Who, and How of Strategic Conservation in the Sagebrush Biome
Year: 2024
The sagebrush biome is rapidly deteriorating largely due to the ecosystem threats of conifer expansion, more frequent and larger wildfires, and proliferation of invasive annual grasses. Reversing the impacts of these threats is a formidable challenge. The Sagebrush Conservation Design (SCD) emphasized that limited conservation resources should first be used to maintain Core Sagebrush Areas (CSA), and then to grow such areas where possible. The SCD heightens the ecological importance of maintaining and strategically growing CSAs. However, the fact that these areas have been identified does not…
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
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
The influence of wildfire risk reduction programs and practices on recreation visitation
Year: 2024
Background: The increasing extent and severity of uncharacteristic wildfire has prompted numerous policies and programs promoting landscape-scale fuels reduction. Aims: We used novel data sources to measure how recreation was influenced by fuels reduction efforts under the US Forest Service Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) Program. Methods: We used posts to four social media platforms to estimate the number of social media user-days within CFLR landscapes and asked: (1) did visitation within CFLR Program landscapes between…
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
Coexisting with wildfire: strengthening collective capacity by changing the status quo
Year: 2024
This article is the fuller written version of the invited closing plenary given by the author at the 10th International Fire Ecology and Management Congress. The article provides a consideration of our capacity to cope, care, and coexist in a fiery world from a social and structural point of view. It focuses on privilege as the root cause of a long and troublesome history within the wildfire profession of not valuing all generational knowledge equally, not treating all cultures with the same respect, not embracing diversity and inclusion, and not affording the same status to all…
Publication Type: Conference Proceedings
Simulated Future Shifts in Wildfire Regimes in Moist Forests of Pacific Northwest, USA
Year: 2024
Fire is an integral natural disturbance in the moist temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but future changes remain uncertain. Fire regimes in this climatically and biophysically diverse region are complex, but typically climate limited. One challenge for interpreting potential changes is conveying projection uncertainty. Using projections of Energy Release Component (ERC) derived from 12 global climate models (GCM) that vary in performance relative to the region's contemporary climate, we simulated thousands of plausible fire seasons with the stochastic spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Socially vulnerable US Pacific Northwest communities are more likely to experience wildfires
Year: 2024
Quantitative wildfire risk assessments increasingly are used to prioritize areas for investments in wildfire risk mitigation actions. However, current assessments of wildfire risk derived from fire models built primarily on biophysical data do not account for socioeconomic contexts that influence community vulnerability to wildfire. Research indicates that despite accounting for only a small proportion of high wildfire hazard areas, communities with fewer socioeconomic resources to devote to wildfire prevention and response may experience outsized exposure and impacts. We examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article