Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 128
A systematic scoping review of the Social Vulnerability Index as applied to natural hazards
Year: 2024
Social vulnerability approaches seek to identify social, economic, and political drivers that exacerbate environmental risks, and inform adaptation strategies that redress uneven vulnerabilities. Social Vulnerability Indices (SVIs), one such approach, have exponentially increased in use since their inception in 2003. This paper contributes the most comprehensive and rigorous systematic assessment of SVIs to date, as applied in hazard and disaster contexts. We evaluate how 246 peer-reviewed articles, published online between 2003 and 2021, conceptualized, constructed, and applied SVIs across…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire branding: Why do new residents make a burn scar their home?
Year: 2024
Researchers have sought to understand why wildland urban interface areas continue to expand in the United States despite increasing riskand loss to those areas. Using the case of the Camp Fire in northern California, which destroyed the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in the fall of 2018, this article explores how new arrivals to this area interact with rebuild institutions to evaluate their risk of future wildfires. The paper builds off of concepts of “disaster machine” (Pais and Elliott in Soc Forces 86(4):1415–1453, 2008) and “resilience gentrification” (Gould and Lewis, 2021…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation
Year: 2024
Fire suppression is the primary management response to wildfires in many areas globally. By removing less-extreme wildfires, this approach ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions. Here, we term this the “suppression bias” and use a simulation model to highlight how this bias fundamentally impacts wildfire activity, independent of fuel accumulation and climate change. We illustrate how attempting to suppress all wildfires necessarily means that fires will burn with more severe and less diverse ecological impacts, with burned area increasing at faster rates than…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Garden design can reduce wildfire risk and drive more sustainable co-existence with wildfire
Year: 2024
Destructive wildfire disasters are escalating globally, challenging existing fire management paradigms. The establishment of defensible space around homes in wildland and rural urban interfaces can help to reduce the risk of house loss and provide a safe area for residents and firefighters to defend the property from wildfire. Although defensible space is a well-established concept in fire management, it has received surprisingly limited scientific discussion. Here we reviewed guidelines on the creation of defensible space from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Coupling fire and energy in the Anthropocene: Deploying scale to analyze social vulnerability to forced electricity outages in California
Year: 2024
Extreme events such as wildfires and winter storms result in disruptions to grid-based electricity delivery. Electricity supply disruptions are both reactive, whereby specific events cause damage to physical infrastructure, or anticipatory where electricity suppliers—namely electric utility companies—preemptively de-energize sections of an electrical grid or distribution network based on elevated potential of extreme conditions that may cause wildfire ignition. De-energization has been promoted as a strategy to mitigate risk of wildfire ignition and spread when active fires may encounter…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Flammability study of decking sections found at the Wildland–Urban interface at different scales
Year: 2023
This work presents a study of the fire reaction of two types of decking sections (wood and thermoplastic) exposed to a radiant heat source. The flammability was studied at two scales: a cone calorimeter was used at product scale (36 cm2) and at assembly scale (around 1300 cm2), experiments were performed under a Large Scale Heat Release calorimeter with a radiant burner. Since the wood decking sections have gaps, the influence of the orientation of the sections facing the burner was further investigated. At product scale, the wood sections ignite sooner than the thermoplastic sections whereas…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk, salience, and housing development in the wildland–urban interface
Year: 2023
As wildfires increase in both severity and frequency, understanding the role of risk saliency on human behaviors in the face of fire risks becomes paramount. While research has shown that homebuyers capitalize wildfire risk following a fire, studies of the role that risk saliency plays on residential development is limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the link between wildfire risk saliency and the rate of residential development in wildfire-prone areas, by treating recent wildfires as conditionally exogenous shocks to saliency. Using geospatial data on residential…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring and Testing Wildfire Risk Decision-Making in the Face of Deep Uncertainty
Year: 2023
We integrated a mechanistic wildfire simulation system with an agent-based landscape change model to investigate the feedbacks among climate change, population growth, development, landowner decision-making, vegetative succession, and wildfire. Our goal was to develop an adaptable simulation platform for anticipating risk-mitigation tradeoffs in a fire-prone wildland–urban interface (WUI) facing conditions outside the bounds of experience. We describe how five social and ecological system (SES) submodels interact over time and space to generate highly variable alternative futures even within…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire frequency and vulnerability in California
Year: 2023
Wildfires pose a large and growing threat to communities across California, and understanding fire vulnerability and impacts can enable more effective risk management. Government hazard maps are often used to identify at-risk areas, but hazard zones and fire experience may have different implications for communities. This analysis of three decades of fire footprints, hazard maps, and census and real estate data shows that communities with high fire experience differ substantially from communities with high fire hazard. High-hazard communities average higher incomes than low- and no-hazard…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Homeowner firewise behaviors in fire-prone central Oregon: An exploration of the attitudinal, situational, and cultural worldviews impacting pre-fire mitigation actions Author links open overlay panel
Year: 2023
Highlights • People with egalitarian cultural traits are more likely to engage in fire mitigation behaviors. • Concern, experience, and proximity all have a positive relationship to engagement in fire mitigation behaviors. • Fire-resistant building materials and landscaping requirements are effective policy tools for homeowner mitigation actions. • Younger homeowners and women are more likely to engage in fire mitigation actions. Abstract As a result of climate change and past management practices, wildfires are becoming larger and occurring more frequently than ever before in the Western U.S…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis
Year: 2023
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Wildland Firefighters’ Assessments of Structure Defensibility
Year: 2023
In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire-resistant Plants for Home Landscapes: Reduce Wildfire Risk with Proper Plant Selection and Placement
Year: 2023
In the Pacific Northwest, fires are a natural part of the changing landscape. As homeowners continue to build in the wildland-urban interface, they must take special precautions to protect their lives, homes, and property.One way to do this is to create a defensible space around your home. This is the area between your home or other structures, where potential fuel (materials or vegetation) have been modified, reduced, or cleared to create a barrier and slow the spread of wildfire toward your home. A defensible space also allows room for firefighters to fight the fire safely. Three critical…
Publication Type: Report
Wildland–Urban Interface: Definition and Physical Fire Risk Mitigation Measures, a Systematic Review
Year: 2023
Due to the associated fire risk, the wildland–urban interface (WUI) has drawn the attention of researchers and managers from a range of backgrounds. From a land management point of view, it is important to identify the WUI to determine areas to prioritise for fire risk prevention. It is also important to know the fire risk mitigation measures available to select the most appropriate for each specific context. In this systematic review, definitions of the WUI were investigated and physical mitigation measures for reducing the risk of fire were examined from a land management perspective. The…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors influencing ember accumulation near a building
Year: 2023
Background: Embers, also known as firebrands, are the leading cause of building ignition during wildland–urban fires. This is attributed both to direct ignition of material on, in, or attached to the building, and indirect ignition where they ignite vegetation or other combustible material near the building, which results in a radiant heat and/or direct flame contact exposure that ignites the building. Indirect ignition of a building can occur when embers accumulate on and ignite nearby combustible fuel, resulting in radiant heat or flame constant exposure. Aims/implications: Factors that…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burnover events identified during the 2018 Camp Fire
Year: 2023
Background: The Camp Fire burned through communities in Butte County, California, on 8 November 2018. The fire destroyed over 18 000 structures and caused 85 fatalities, mostly within the first 12 h of the incident. Aims: A post-fire case study was conducted to learn from the devastating incident. Methods: The case study was supported by detailed first-hand accounts from 157 first responders, photos and videos, first responder radio logs, and other field data. Subsequent analysis and data integration yielded a timeline reconstruction of the first 24 h of the entire event, as well as…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The analysis of traffic data of wildfire evacuation: the case study of the 2020 Glass Fire
Year: 2023
Evacuation is a crucial policy to mitigate wildfire impacts. Understanding traffic dynamics during a wildfire evacuation can help authorities to improve in improving emergency management plans, thus improving life safety. In this study, we developed a methodology to extract historical traffic data from vehicle detector stations and automate the analysis of traffic dynamics for actual wildfire evacuations. This has been implemented in an open-access tool called Traffic Dynamic Analyser (TDA) which generates speed-density and flow-density relationships from data using both commonly used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
MCDM-Based Wildfire Risk Assessment: A Case Study on the State of Arizona
Year: 2023
The increasing frequency of wildfires has posed significant challenges to communities worldwide. The effectiveness of all aspects of disaster management depends on a credible estimation of the prevailing risk. Risk, the product of a hazard’s likelihood and its potential consequences, encompasses the probability of hazard occurrence, the exposure of assets to these hazards, existing vulnerabilities that amplify the consequences, and the capacity to manage, mitigate, and recover from their consequences. This paper employs the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework, which produces…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Unprotected lands: A case study of a wildland-urban interface community in “No-Man's land”
Year: 2023
There are areas of the United States that have no formalized fire protection. These lands are colloquially referred to as “no-man’s land” but are recognized by many land management agencies as unprotected lands. Unprotected lands are generally rural landscapes and exist in areas that are sparsely populated and lack formalized fire protection. In some cases, lands that are designated as wildland-urban interface are comprised of significant portions of unprotected lands. Currently, there has been little in the way of research completed that pertains to the overall amount of land that is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating driving behavior patterns during wildfire evacuations in wildland-urban interface zones using connected vehicles data
Year: 2023
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire. Understanding the driving behavior of individuals to evacuate fire-affected WUI areas is important as the evacuees may encounter low visibility and difficult driving conditions due to burning material and steep topography. This study investigates the driving behavior patterns of individuals during historical wildfire events in rural and urban areas with mandatory evacuation orders using a connected vehicle…
Publication Type: Journal Article