Research Database
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17
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
Keepers of the Flame: Supporting the Revitalization of Indigenous Cultural Burning
Year: 2021
The revitalization of cultural burning is a priority for many Native American tribes and for agencies and organizations that recognize the cultural and ecological importance of this practice. Traditional fire practitioners are working to resist the impact of settler colonialism and reestablish cultural burning to promote traditional foods and materials, exercise their sovereignty in land management, and strengthen their communities’ cultural, physical and emotional wellbeing. Despite broad support for cultural burning, the needs of practitioners are often poorly understood by non-Native…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Stewardship: Federal/Tribal Partnerships for Wildland Fire Research and Management
Year: 2021
Over millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America’s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today. This article introduces philosophical, conceptual, and operational approaches to working with American Indians through research and management partnerships in the fields of wildland fire, forestry, and fuels, with applications to climate change and forest landscape restoration strategies (Mansourian and others 2019). Of central importance are respectful collaborative relationships among the various parties (Tribes, agencies,…
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
Forest Roads and Operational Wildfire Response Planning
Year: 2021
Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations. Of interesthere is how road networks directly support fire control operations, and how managers incorporatethat information into pre-season assessment and planning. In this communication we briefly reviewand illustrate how forest roads relate to recent advances in operationally focused wildfire decisionsupport. We focus on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: ten common questions
Year: 2021
We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Perceptions of wildland fire smoke
Year: 2021
With exposure to wildland fire smoke projectedto further increase (Barbero et al. 2015) there is aclear need for efforts to better mitigate or adapt tosmoke impacts in high-risk areas. Such efforts relyon an understanding of how people perceive, planfor, and respond to smoke. This synthesis compilespublished scholarly literature on how individualsperceive wildland fire smoke to offer an overviewof current knowledge on wildland fire smoke perceptions.It is intended to serve as a documentationof the scope, parameters, and gaps of researchto 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
Advancing the Science of Wildland Fire Dynamics Using Process-Based Models
Year: 2018
As scientists and managers seek to understand fire behavior in conditions that extend beyond the limits of our current empirical models and prior experiences, they will need new tools that foster a more mechanistic understanding of the processes driving fire dynamics and effects. Here we suggest that process-based models are powerful research tools that are useful for investigating a large number of emerging questions in wildland fire sciences. These models can play a particularly important role in advancing our understanding, in part, because they allow their users to evaluate the potential…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) with recorded fire occurrence and final fire size
Year: 2018
Most previous research has assessed the ability of the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) to portray fire activity at either single sites or on small spatial scales, despite it being a nation-wide system. This study seeks to examine the relationships between a set of NFDRS fire danger indices (Fire Danger Ratings, Staffing Level and the Ignition Component) and measures of fire activity (fire occurrence and final fire size) across the entire conterminous US over an 8-year period. We reveal that different regions of the US display different levels of correspondence between each of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Embracing Complexity to Advance the Science of Wildland Fire Behavior
Year: 2018
Wildland fire behavior research has largely focused on the steady-state interactions between fuels and heat fluxes. Contemporary research is revealing new questions outside the bounds of this simplified approach. Here, we explore the complex interactions taking place beyond steady-state assumptions through acknowledging the manufactured separation of research disciplines in fire science and the dynamic interactions that unfold when these separations are removed. Through a series of examples spanning at least four research disciplines and three ranges of spatial scale, we illustrate that by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk reduction in the United States: Leadership staff perceptions of local fire department roles and responsibilities
Year: 2018
As wildland fires have had increasing negative impacts on a range of human values, in many parts of the United States (U.S.) and around the world, collaborative risk reduction efforts among agencies, homeowners, and fire departments are needed to improve wildfire safety and mitigate risk. Using interview data from 46 senior officers from local fire departments around the U.S., we examine how leadership staff view their departments’ roles and responsibilities in wildfire risk reduction. Overall, our findings indicate that local fire personnel are often performing a variety of mitigation tasks…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Defining extreme wildfire events: Difficulties, challenges, and impacts
Year: 2018
Every year worldwide some extraordinary wildfires occur, overwhelming suppression capabilities, causing substantial damages, and often resulting in fatalities. Given their increasing frequency, there is a debate about how to address these wildfires with significant social impacts, but there is no agreement upon terminology to describe them. The concept of extreme wildfire event (EWE) has emerged to bring some coherence on this kind of events. It is increasingly used, often as a synonym of other terms related to wildfires of high intensity and size, but its definition remains elusive. The goal…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The influence of fire history on soil nutrients and vegetation cover in mixed-severity fire regime forests of the eastern Olympic Peninsula, Washington, USA
Year: 2018
The rain shadow forests of the Olympic Peninsula exemplify a mixed-severity fire regime class in the midst of a highly productive landscape where spatial heterogeneity of fire severity may have significant implications for below and aboveground post-fire recovery. The purpose of this study was to quantify the impacts of wildfire on forest soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and assess the relationship of pyrogenic carbon (PyC) to soil processes in this mixed-severity ecosystem. We established a 112-year fire chronosequence with nine similar forest stands ranging in time since lastfire (TSF…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pyro-Ecophysiology: Shifting the Paradigm of Live Wildland Fuel Research
Year: 2018
The most destructive wildland fires occur in mixtures of living and dead vegetation, yet very little attention has been given to the fundamental differences between factors that control their flammability. Historically, moisture content has been used to evaluate the relative flammability of live and dead fuels without considering major, unreported differences in the factors that control their variations across seasons and years. Physiological changes at both the leaf and whole plant level have the potential to explain ignition and fire behavior phenomena in live fuels that have been poorly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High-severity fire: Evaluating its key drivers and mapping its probability across western US forests
Year: 2018
Wildland fire is a critical process in forests of the western United States (US). Variation in fire behavior, which is heavily influenced by fuel loading, terrain, weather, and vegetation type, leads to heterogeneity in fire severity across landscapes. The relative influence of these factors in driving fire severity, however, is poorly understood. Here, we explore the drivers of high-severity fire for forested ecoregions in the western US over the period 2002–2015. Fire severity was quantified using a satellite-inferred index of severity, the relativized burn ratio. For each ecoregion, we…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Weather Conditions for Desired Smoke Plumes at a FASMEE Burn Site
Year: 2018
Weather is an important factor that determines smoke development, which is essential information for planning smoke field measurements. This study identifies the synoptic systems that would favor to produce the desired smoke plumes for the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE). Daysmoke and PB-Piedmont (PB-P) models are used to simulate smoke plume evolution during the day time and smoke drainage and fog formation during the nighttime for hypothetical prescribed burns on 5–8 February 2011 at the Stewart Army Base in the southeastern United States. Daysmoke simulation is…
Publication Type: Journal Article