Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 143
Assessing costs and constraints of forest residue disposal by pile burning
Year: 2025
Pile burning of thinned residues is a critical tool to dispose of fuels and to reduce wildfire risk in overstocked, fire-prone forests globally. However, cost estimates of pile burning are limited. In the Western United States, where fuel reduction and pile burning are key strategies to mitigate risk of severe wildfire, previous reports estimate that the average cost of pile burning after machine treatment is $543 ac−1 ($1,343 ha−1). There is, however, limited information on the costs of hand thinning and pile burning. In response, this study quantified the costs of cutting and yarding,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimizing woody fuel treatments to reduce wildfire risk to sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin of the western US
Year: 2025
The sagebrush biome in the western United States is a focus of widespread conservation concern due to multiple interacting threats including larger, more severe wildfires. Given the immense scale of the region and limited resources, prioritizing restoration treatments is essential for optimizing risk reduction and managing for resilient ecosystems. We leveraged work identifying sagebrush areas suitable for woody fuel treatments based on resilience to disturbance and resistance to annual grass invasion (R&R) and areas of sagebrush mapped as high conservation value. We used wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland firefighter exposure and female cancer risk: currently available evidence
Year: 2025
The James M. Inhofe National Defence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 established that certain illnesses and diseases are to be deemed as proximately caused by employment in federal fire protection activities. However, cancers affecting female wildland firefighters were not included on this list and are recommended for further evaluation. We present the best available scientific evidence for the risk of breast and gynaecological cancers associated with exposures that are commonly measured in the wildland fire environment, including benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Household needs among wildfire survivors in the 2017 Northern California wildfires
Year: 2025
Wildfires are impacting communities globally, with California wildfires often breaking records of size and destructiveness. Knowing how communities are affected by these wildfires is vital to understanding recovery. We sought to identify impacted communities' post-wildfire needs and characterize how those needs change over time. The WHAT-Now study deployed a survey that was made publicly available for communities affected by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires or the accompanying smoke at beginning approximately four months post-fire with the vast majority completed by nine months…
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
Preventing Human-Caused Wildfire Ignitions on Public Lands: A Review of Best Practices
Year: 2025
Effective interventions to prevent human-caused ignitions on public lands play a critical role in social and ecological adaption to wildfire. While wildfire prevention spending generates a high return on investment, funding and capacity to support such programing within federal, state, and local land and fire management agencies remains limited. One avenue for ensuring that available funding and staffing for prevention is used to strategically maximize impact is the documentation of best practices, grounded in empirical data, that can provide indicators for effective intervention with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland Fire–Related Smoke PM2.5 and Cardiovascular Disease Emergency Department Visits in the Western United States
Year: 2025
BackgroundThe impact of short‐term exposure to fine particulate matter with a diameter ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5) due to wildland fire smoke on the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains unclear. We investigated the association between short‐term exposure to wildfire smoke PM2.5 and emergency department visits for acute CVD in the western United States from 2007 to 2018.MethodsWe analyzed 49 759 958 emergency department visits for primary or secondary diagnoses of atrial fibrillation (AF), acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, stroke, and total CVD across 5…
Publication Type: Journal Article
COVID‐19 Fueled an Elevated Number of Human‐Caused Ignitions in the Western United States During the 2020 Wildfire Season
Year: 2025
The area burned in the western United States during the 2020 fire season was the greatest in the modern era. Here we show that the number of human-caused fires in 2020 also was elevated, nearly 20% higher than the 1992–2019 average. Although anomalously dry conditions enabled ignitions to spread and contributed to record area burned, these conditions alone do not explain the surge in the number of human-caused ignitions. We argue that behavioral shifts aimed at curtailing the spread of COVID-19 altered human-environment interactions to favor increased ignitions. For example, the number 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
Long-range PM2.5 pollution and health impacts from the 2023 Canadian wildfires
Year: 2025
Smoke from extreme wildfires in Canada adversely affected air quality in many regions in 20231,2. Here we use satellite observations, machine learning and a chemical transport model to quantify global and regional PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 μm in diameter) exposure and human health impacts related to the 2023 Canadian wildfires. We find that the fires increased annual PM2.5 exposure worldwide by 0.17 μg m–3 (95% confidence interval, 0.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fine Particulate Matter From 2020 California Wildfires and Mental Health–Related Emergency Department Visits
Year: 2025
Importance: A growing body of research suggests that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5; particle size 2.5 microns or smaller) may be associated with mental health outcomes. However, the potential impact of wildfire-specific PM2.5 exposure on mental health remains underexplored.Objective: To investigate whether wildfire-specific PM2.5 exposure may be associated with emergency department (ED) visits for mental health conditions, including all-cause and for psychoactive substance use, nonmood psychotic disorders, anxiety, depression, and other mood-affective disorders during the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Equity in resilience: a case study of community resilience to wildfire in southwestern Oregon, United States
Year: 2025
In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system. Marginalized communities are often most affected and least prepared for disturbances of this kind, where racism, colonialism, and structural equities prevent meaningful inclusion and equitable allocation of resources. This research centers these voices in an empirical study of the situated resilience of the Rogue River Basin, rooted in the work of community-based organizations…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial…
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
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial resolution burned area information from two FEI…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate Change Contributions to US Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 Mortality Between 2006-2020
Year: 2025
RATIONALE Wildfires have increased in frequency and intensity due to climate change and now contribute to nearly half of the annual average of fine particulate matter in the US. While the effects of short-term wildfire-PM2.5 exposure on respiratory diseases are well-described, the impact of climate change on longer duration wildfire-PM2.5 mortality is unknown. Our aim was to determine the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to wildfire smoke PM2.5 mortality on a county-level across the conterminous US between 2006-2020. METHODS We use an attribution model to compare observed wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mortality attributable to PM 2.5 from wildland fires inCalifornia from 2008 to 2018
Year: 2024
In California, wildfire risk and severity have grown substantially in the last several decades. Research has characterized extensive adverse health impacts from exposure to wildfire-attributable fine particulate matter (PM2.5), but few studies have quantified long-term outcomes, and none have used a wildfire-specific chronic dose-response mortality coefficient. Here, we quantified the mortality burden for PM2.5 exposure from California fires from 2008 to 2018 using Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system wildland fire PM2.5 estimates. We used a concentration-response function for PM2…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Demand for Information for Wildland Fire Management
Year: 2024
Significant resources have been devoted to increasing the supply of data and information products for wildland fire management. There has been comparatively less emphasis on understanding the demand for these products. There are large differences in the number of information sources that fire managers use in decision making. We developed a value-of-information model for wildland fire managers to formulate hypotheses about what factors drive these differences. Data from a comprehensive internet survey targeting a well-defined population of the Southwest wildland fire managers are used to test…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bacterial Emission Factors: A Foundation for the Terrestrial-Atmospheric Modeling of Bacteria Aerosolized by Wildland Fires
Year: 2024
Wildland fire is a major global driver in the exchange of aerosols between terrestrial environments and the atmosphere. This exchange is commonly quantified using emission factors or the mass of a pollutant emitted per mass of fuel burned. However, emission factors for microbes aerosolized by fire have yet to be determined. Using bacterial cell concentrations collected on unmanned aircraft systems over forest fires in Utah, USA, we determine bacterial emission factors (BEFs) for the first time. We estimate that 1.39 × 1010 and 7.68 × 1011 microbes are emitted for each Mg of biomass consumed…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bridging scales for landscape-level wildfire adaptation: A case study of the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition
Year: 2024
Federal-level strategies or guidance for addressing wildfire risk encourage adaptation activities that span progressively larger scales, often focusing on landscape-level action that necessitates coordination between decision-makers and socially diverse communities. Collaborative organizations are increasingly explored as one approach for coordinating local efforts that address wildfire risk and adaptation, offering a platform for scaling and adjusting federal and state guidance that align with the needs of local landscapes. We conducted semi-structured interviews with members and supporters…
Publication Type: Journal Article