Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 116
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
Understanding rural adaptation to smoke from wildfires and forest management: insights for aligning approaches with community contexts
Year: 2025
Background: Rural communities are increasingly impacted by smoke produced by wildfires and forest management activties. Understanding local influences on smoke adaptation and mitigation is critical to social adaptation as fire risk continues to rise.Aims: We sought to determine the role of local social context in smoke adaptation and gauge interest in adaptation strategies that might reduce exposure.Methods: We conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with 56 residents and professionals in Parks, Arizona, USA, a rural community adjacent to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing wildland fire suppression effectiveness with infrared imaging on experimental fires
Year: 2025
Background: Suppression effectiveness is often evaluated by measuring the extent to which it slows fire spread and reduces fireline intensity. Although studies have used infrared (IR) imaging methods to explore suppression effectiveness, most do not measure or assess the influence of water application on energy release.Aims: This preliminary analysis uses IR imagery to quantify the impact of suppression on fire behaviour and the reduction in energy released from a flaming fire.Methods: We conducted a series of small-scale experimental burns…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The 2023 wildfires in British Columbia, Canada: impacts, drivers, and transformations to coexist with wildfire
Year: 2025
In 2023, all regions of British Columbia (BC) experienced record-breaking fire weather and wildfires, with extreme behavior and social-ecological effects. In total, 2245 wildfires burned 2840 545 hectares. Contemporary wildfires are the culmination of a century of altered human–forest–wildfire relationships, exacerbated by climate change. Transformative change is urgently needed for the ecosystems and communities to be resilient to wildfire. We present six interrelated strategies needed to amplify the pace and scale of change in response to recent wildfire extremes: (1) Immediately diversify…
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
Future enhanced threshold effects of wildfire drivers could increase burned areas in northern mid- and high latitudes
Year: 2025
Wildfires exhibit extensive nonlinear characteristics and threshold effects in response to environmental changes. However, how threshold effects affect wildfire responses and their future changes remains unclear. Here we identified thresholds where wildfire-driver relationships shift and estimated the impact of threshold effects on wildfire dynamics in the 21st century in northern mid- and high latitudes (>30°N). Wildfire-driver thresholds, coregulated by gradient differences in heat and moisture conditions, vegetation productivity, and human activities, effectively explain the spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effects of long-term ecological research and cognitive biases on the evaluation of scientific information by public land managers in Oregon and Washington, USA
Year: 2025
Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access. Barriers, such as paywalls, insufficient capacity, and information overload play an important role in determining what scientific information managers have access and attend to. Additionally, characteristics of managers themselves also influence what scientific information they prioritize and implement. Specific factors likely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland Firefighters Suffer Increasing Risk of Job-Related Death
Year: 2025
Wildland firefighting is a niche specialization in the fire service - inherently dangerous with unique risks. Over the past decade, fatalities amongst all firefighters have decreased; however, wildland firefighter fatalities have increased. This subject has only been described in the grey literature, and a paucity of medical literature exists. The United States Fire Administration's online fatality database was queried for on duty mortality between 1990 and 2022. The year 2001 was excluded due to the 340 deaths that occurred on September 11th. Data collected included demographics, incident…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trajectories of community fire adaptation: Social diversity, social fragmentation and the temporal evolution of wildfire action
Year: 2025
There is increasing acknowledgement that the unique characteristics (i.e., social contexts) of human communities influence variable means for adapting to the growing risks posed by wildland fire. However, there has been less work documenting how community social contexts evolve over time, and the ways they might influence collective mitigations pursued in partnership with professionals when addressing wildfire planning. We conducted 73 semi-structured interviews with 112 residents, emergency management professionals, government officials and members of community organizations in two Nevada…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Untrammeling the wilderness: restoring natural conditions through the return of human-ignited fire
Year: 2024
Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes. Within many designated wilderness areas, this intentional exclusion of fire has clearly altered ecological processes and thus constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Through a framework that recognizes four orders of trammeling, we demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Visibility-informed mapping of potential firefighter lookout locations using maximum entropy modelling
Year: 2024
BackgroundSituational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.AimsTo use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.MethodsLidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pathways for sustainable coexistence with wildfires
Year: 2024
Sustainable coexistence with wildfire requires overcoming vicious cycles that trap socio-ecological systems in maladaptive states. A carefully coordinated programme of innovation, education and governance, the ‘wildfire adaptation triad’, is essential for escaping maladaptation across national, community and individual scales.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Multiple social and environmental factors affect wildland fire response of full or less-than-full suppression
Year: 2024
Wildland fire incident commanders make wildfire response decisions within an increasingly complex socio-environmental context. Threats to human safety and property, along with public pressures and agency cultures, often lead commanders to emphasize full suppression. However, commanders may use less-than-full suppression to enhance responder safety, reduce firefighting costs, and encourage beneficial effects of fire. This study asks: what management, socioeconomic, environmental, and fire behavior characteristics are associated with full suppression and the less-than-full suppression methods…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mental Health and Traumatic Occupational Exposure in Wildland Fire Dispatchers
Year: 2024
Wildland fire dispatchers play a key role in wildland fire management and response organization; however, to date, wildland fire studies have largely focused on the physical hazards and, to a lesser extent, mental health hazards of wildland firefighting operational personnel, and dispatcher studies have primarily focused on 911 and police dispatchers. Studies of other dispatchers have provided some limited insight into potential strains impacting this workforce, including work-related fatigue, burnout, and traumatic exposure. However, the specific job hazards that are faced by wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation
Year: 2024
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Characterising ignition precursors associated with high levels of deployment of wildland fire personnel
Year: 2024
BackgroundAs fire seasons in the Western US intensify and lengthen, fire managers have been grappling with increases in simultaneous, significant incidents that compete for response resources and strain capacity of the current system.AimsTo address this challenge, we explore a key research question: what precursors are associated with ignitions that evolve into incidents requiring high levels of response personnel?MethodsWe develop statistical models linking human, fire weather and fuels related factors with cumulative and peak personnel…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area
Year: 2024
Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables. Fragmentation caused modelled BA changes of over ±10% in 16% of [0.5°] grid-cells. On average, more fragmentation decreased net BA globally (−1.5%), as estimated empirically. However, in recently-deforested tropical areas,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Retention of highly qualified wildland firefighters in the Western United States
Year: 2024
Federal agencies responsible for wildland fire management face increasing needs for personnel as fire seasons lengthen and fire size continues to grow, yet federal agencies have struggled to recruit and retain firefighting personnel. While many have speculated that long seasons, challenging working conditions, and low wages contribute to recruitment and retention challenges, there has been…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The cost of operational complexity: A causal assessment of pre-fire mitigation and wildfire suppression
Year: 2024
Pre-fire mitigation efforts that include the installation and maintenance of fuel breaks are integral to wildfire suppression in Southern California. Fuel breaks alter fire behavior and assist in fire suppression at strategic locations on the landscape. However, the combined effectiveness of fuel breaks and wildfire suppression is not well studied. Using daily firefighting personnel to proxy the quantity and diversity of potential fire suppression operations (i.e., operational complexity), we examined 15 wildfires from 2017 to 2020 in the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland…
Publication Type: Journal Article
From flexibility to feasibility: identifying the policy conditions that support the management of wildfire for objectives other than full suppression
Year: 2024
Background. Intentional management of naturally ignited wildfires has emerged as a valuable tool for addressing the social and ecological consequences of a century of fire exclusion in policy and practice. Policy in the United States now allows wildfires to be managed for suppression and other than full suppression (OTFS) objectives simultaneously, giving flexibility to local decision makers. Aims. To extend existing research on the history of wildfire management, investigate how wildfire professionals interpret current policy with respect to OTFS management, and better understand how they…
Publication Type: Journal Article