Research Database
Displaying 121 - 140 of 300
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
Effectiveness of fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs in wildland firefighting: a cluster randomised control trial
Year: 2022
Critical to effective fire management is the protection and preparedness of highly trained wildland firefighters who routinely face extreme physical and psychological demands. To date, there is limited scientific evidence of psychosocial education intervention effectiveness in this context. The objective of the current study is to utilise a cluster randomised control trial study design to evaluate fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs across a wildland fire season. Wildland firefighters (n = 230) were randomly assigned by their work location to one of four…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Construction of Probabilistic Wildfire Risk Estimates for Individual Real Estate Parcels for the Contiguous United States
Year: 2022
The methodology used by the First Street Foundation Wildfire Model (FSF-WFM) to compute estimates of the 30-year, climate-adjusted aggregate wildfire hazard for the contiguous United States at 30 m horizontal resolution is presented. The FSF-WFM integrates several existing methods from the wildfire science community and implements computationally efficient and scalable modeling techniques to allow for new high-resolution, CONUS-wide hazard generation. Burn probability, flame length, and ember spread for the years 2022 and 2052 are computed from two ten-year representative Monte Carlo…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Costs and Costs Avoided From Wildfire Fire Management—A Conceptual Framework for a Value of Information Analysis
Year: 2022
Wildfire is an integral part of many ecosystems, and wildland fires also have the potential for costly impacts to human health and safety, and damage to structures and natural resources. Public land managers use various strategies for managing landscape conditions that can affect wildfire, broadly: fuel treatment (and other pre-fire risk mitigation), fire suppression, and post-fire landscape rehabilitation. However, with any of these strategies there is considerable uncertainty in the outcomes that managers can obtain, and thus on the societal costs and benefits associated with wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Minimize the bad days: Wildland fire response and suppression success
Year: 2022
• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating. • By mobilizing a timely and safe initial response, early detection technologies, strategic networks of fuel breaks, and Rangeland Fire Protection Associations help “minimize the bad days” on the fireline and improve suppression…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme fire spread events and area burned under recent and future climate in the western USA
Year: 2022
Aim: Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single-day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities. Our objectives were to gain new insight into the relationships between extreme single-day fire spread events, annual area burned, and fire season climate and to predict changes under future warming. Location: Fire-prone regions of the western USA. Time period: 2002–2020; a future +2°C scenario. Methods: We used a satellite-derived dataset of daily fire spread events and gridded…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human- and lightning-caused wildland fire ignition clusters in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire ignitions in BC using data from 2006 to 2020. We found that human-caused ignition clusters tended to occur around population centres, First Nations communities, roads and valleys, and were more common in the southern half of the province, which is more populated. Lightning-ignition clusters were generally…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Characterization of Fire-Management Research: A Bibliometric Review of Global Networks and Themes
Year: 2022
Although humans have interacted with wildfires for millennia, a science-based approach to fire management has evolved in recent decades. This paper reviews the development of firemanagement research, focusing on publications that use this term in their title, abstract, or keywords identified on the Scopus platform. This resulted in the identification of 5624 documents published between 1973 and 2021. Publication rates have particularly increased since 2010. The paper details the characteristics of this body of the literature, including the main authors, institutions, and countries.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Large wildfire driven increases in nighttime fire activity observed across CONUS from 2003–2020
Year: 2022
Despite the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of wildfires, little attention has been paid to the spatiotemporal patterns of nighttime fire activity across the conterminous United States (CONUS). Daytime fire radiative power (FRP) detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) was nearly evenly split (54% vs. 46%) between inside and outside wildfires from 2003 to 2020. In contrast, 94% of nighttime FRP was detected within wildfires, of which 95% was detected within large wildfires (> 2023 ha). Nighttime proportions (i.e., the proportion of total summed FRP…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human Fire Use and Management: A Global Database of Anthropogenic Fire Impacts for Modelling
Year: 2022
Human use and management of fire in landscapes have a long history and vary globally in purpose and impact. Existing local research on how people use and manage fire is fragmented across multiple disciplines and is diverse in methods of data collection and analysis. If progress is to be made on systematic understanding of human fire use and management globally, so that it might be better represented in dynamic global vegetation models, for example, we need improved synthesis of existing local research and literature. The database of anthropogenic fire impacts (DAFI) presented here is a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Designing forest restoration projects to optimize the application of broadcast burning
Year: 2022
Active forest restoration programs on western US national forests face multiple challenges to meet their broad ecological goals while designing projects that generate sufficient revenue to build and maintain private forest management capacity needed to expand the scale and scope of treatments. We explored ways to design projects where admixing of treatments along gradients of dry and moist mixed conifer forest types could maximize financial viability while including substantial area where broadcast burning could be applied in conjunction with other treatments. In general, we found that…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-Envisioning Wildland Fire Governance: Addressing the Transboundary, Uncertain, and Contested Aspects of Wildfire
Year: 2022
Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem. For instance, while wildfire is often described as a cross-boundary problem, understanding wildfire risk as transboundary highlights important political and institutional challenges that complicate collaboration across jurisdictions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sand and fire: applying the sandpile model of self-organised criticality to wildfire mitigation
Year: 2022
Background: Prescribed burns have been increasingly utilised in forest management in the past few decades. However, their effectiveness in reducing the risk of destructive wildfires has been debated. The sandpile model of self-organised criticality, first proposed to model natural hazards, has been recently applied to wildfire research for describing a negative linear relationship between the logarithm of fire size, in area burned, and the logarithm of fire incidence number of that size. Aims: We demonstrate the applicability of the sandpile model to an understanding of wildfire incidence and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
What do you mean, ‘megafire’?
Year: 2022
Background ‘Megafire’ is an emerging concept commonly used to describe fires that are extreme in terms of size, behaviour, and/or impacts, but the term’s meaning remains ambiguous. Approach We sought to resolve ambiguity surrounding the meaning of ‘megafire’ by conducting a structured review of the use and definition of the term in several languages in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. We collated definitions and descriptions of megafire and identified criteria frequently invoked to define megafire. We recorded the size and location of megafires and mapped them to reveal global…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Comparing smoke emissions and impacts under alternative forest management regimes
Year: 2022
Smoke from wildfires has become a growing public health issue around the world but especially in western North America and California. At the same time, managers and scientists recommend thinning and intentional use of wildland fires to restore forest health and reduce smoke from poorly controlled wildfires. Because of the changing climate and management paradigms, the evaluation of smoke impacts needs to shift evaluations from the scale of individual fire events to long-term fire regimes and regional impacts under different management strategies. To confront this challenge, we integrated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Communicating with the public about wildland fire: A resource for practitioners to plan engagement strategies
Year: 2021
This infographic summarizes recommendations from a review of 32 research studies about communicating with the public about wildland fire and smoke
Publication Type: Journal Article
Perceptions of wildland fire smoke
Year: 2021
With exposure to wildland fire smoke projected to further increase (Barbero et al. 2015) there is a clear need for efforts to better mitigate or adapt to smoke impacts in high-risk areas. Such efforts relyon an understanding of how people perceive, plan for, and respond to smoke. This synthesis compiles published scholarly literature on how individuals perceive wildland fire smoke to offer an overview of current knowledge on wildland fire smoke perceptions.It is intended to serve as a documentation of the scope, parameters, and gaps of research to date in this field.
Publication Type: Report
A Mixed Methods Literature Review and Framework for Decision Factors That May Influence the Utilization of Managed Wildfire on Federal Lands, USA
Year: 2021
There is increasing discussion in the academic and agency literature, as well as popular media, about the need to address the existing deficit of beneficial fire on landscapes. One approach allowable under United States federal wildland fire policy that could help address this condition is by deliberately managing wildfire with a strategy other than full suppression (hereafter referred to as ‘managed wildfire’). To improve the understanding of the managed fire decision-making process, we conducted a mixed methods review of the existing literature. This review spanned 1976 to 2013 and used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contrasting the role of human- and lightning-caused wildfires on future fire regimes on a Central Oregon landscape
Year: 2021
Climate change is expected to increase fire activity in many regions of the globe, but the relative role of human vs. lightning-caused ignitions on future fire regimes is unclear. We developed statistical models that account for the spatiotemporal ignition patterns by cause in the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Oregon, USA. Projected changes in energy release component from a suite of climate models were used with our model to quantify changes in frequency and extent of human and lightning-caused fires and record-breaking events based on sizes of individual fires between contemporary (2006…
Publication Type: Journal Article
An ecological perspective on living with fire in ponderosa pine forests of Oregon and Washington: Resistance, gone but not forgotten
Year: 2021
Wildland fires (WLF) have become more frequent, larger, and severe with greater impacts to society and ecosys- tems and dramatic increases in firefighting costs. Forests throughout the range of ponderosa pine in Oregon and Washington are jeopardized by the interaction of anomalously dense forest structure, a warming and dry- ing climate, and an expanding human population. These forests evolved with frequent interacting disturbances including low-severity surface fires, droughts, and biological disturbance agents (BDAs). Chronic low-severity disturbances were, and still are, critical to…
Publication Type: Journal Article