This report assesses recent forest disturbance in the Western United States and discusses implications for sustainability. Individual chapters focus on fire, drought, insects, disease, invasive plants, and socioeconomic impacts.
Over millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America’s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today.
Wildfire is an annual threat for many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. In some severe events, evacuation is one potential course of action to gain safety from an advancing wildfire.
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.
This literature review synthesizes empirical research about wildland fire communication to provide practitioners, such as land managers, public health and safety officials, community groups, and others working with the public, evidence-based recommendations for communication work.
As the frequency and size of wildfires increase, accurate assessment of burn severityis essential for understanding fire effects and evaluating post-fire vegetation impacts.
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.
As the need for wildfire adaptation for human populations in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) intensifies in the face of changes that have increased the number of wildfires that exceed 100 thousand acres, it is becoming more important to come to a better understanding of social complexity on the WUI landscape.
Optimized wildfire risk reduction strategies are generally not resilient in the event of unanticipated, or very rare events, presenting a hazard in risk assessments which otherwise rely on actuarial, mean-based statistics to characterize risk.
For over 20 years, forest fuel reduction has been the dominant management action in western US forests. These same actions have also been associated with the restoration of highly altered frequent-fire forests.