Background
Wildfire suppression is shaped by a complex interplay of environmental conditions, resource allocation and management strategies.
Aims
Background: Wildfire policy has evolved rapidly over the past three decades, necessitating repeated shifts in management and communication strategies for US land management agencies. One growing focus considers the use of “other than full suppression” (OTFS) strategies, where managers use natural ignitions to achieve management objectives when conditions allow.
Mechanical thinning is often prescribed in dry coniferous forests to reduce stand density, ladder fuels, and canopy fuels before using prescribed burning to manage surface fuels. Mechanical mastication is a tool for thinning forests where commercial thinning is not viable.
Background: In collaborative governance, many of the factors that give rise to the need for collaboration are also identified by scholars as undermining its effectiveness. Complex task environments mean that multiple and varied interests are necessary to address problems, but this inherent pluralism may also increase conflict. This suggests a pluralism paradox.
Fuel-reduction and restoration treatments (“treatments”) are conducted extensively in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of interior western North America (“dry forests”) to reduce potential for uncharacteristically severe wildfire.
Scenarios, or plausible characterizations of the future, can help natural resource stewards plan and act under uncertainty. Current methods for developing scenarios for climate change adaptation planning are often focused on exploring uncertainties in future climate, but new approaches are needed to better represent uncertainties in ecological responses.
Successful implementation of forest management as a nature-based climate solution is dependent on the durability of management-induced changes in forest carbon storage and sequestration.
Gap-based silviculture, which we define as the creation and maintenance of multi-aged stands through the periodic harvesting of discrete canopy gaps, provides a potential mechanism for converting previously high-graded stands into more heterogeneous, multi-aged structures.
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.