Communicating about Fire

During the past two decades, land managers and community leaders in the West have adopted sustainable land management methods to make forests healthier, and to maintain profitable local businesses that are beneficial to their communities.

The Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project has released “Fire for Water,” a 10-minute video (produced by Jon Schwedler, Darren Borgias and Chris Chambers) on the treatment work being done to protect the city of Ashland’s watershed. Some of the work in this multi-partner collaborative project is being supported by SPER funding, and the NW FLN is one of the co-sponsors of the video.

This sourcebook provides answers from the field— strategies and tools that some collaborative resource management groups have used to systematically evaluate their work and adapt plans and management actions based on what they have learned.

The Waldo Canyon fire presented the first opportunity for partners in the national Fire Adapted Communities (FAC) Coalition to collectively assess the performance of mitigation practices in Colorado Springs in a post-fire environment and to compare the results to the mitigation strategy recommended by the Fire Adapted Communities program.

As a result of the increasing environmental and social costs of wildfire, fire management agencies face ever-growing complexity in their management decisions and interactions with the public.

Wildland firefighters are often called on to make tactical decisions under stressful conditions in order to suppress a fire. These decisions can be hindered by human factors such as insufficient knowledge of surroundings and conditions, lack of experience, overextension of resources or loss of situational awareness.