management

For most of the 20th century and beyond, national wildland fire policies concerning fire suppression and fuels management have primarily focused on forested lands. Using summary statistics and landscape metrics, wildfire spatial patterns and trends for non-forest and forest burned area over the past two decades were examined across the U.S, and federal agency jurisdictions.

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.

Forests are essential in regulating global carbon and water cycles and are critical in mitigating climate change.

Vegetation structure affects the vulnerability of a forest to drought events and wildfires. Management decisions, such as thinning intensity and type of understory treatment, influence competition for water resources and amount of fuel available.

Every summer, wildfires burn thousands of acres of forests in the American West. After the fire, forest managers must decide what to do next: Leave the postfire landscape to recover naturally? Harvest some of the burned trees for timber? What combination of management actions is most likely to reduce the severity of a repeat wildfire and to make the forests more resilient?

Wildfire is an integral part of many ecosystems, and wildland fires also have the potential for costly impacts to human health and safety, and damage to structures and natural resources.

Because of past land use changes and changing climate, forests are moving outside of their historical range of variation. As fires become more severe, forest managers are searching for strategies that can restore forest health and reduce fire risk. However, management activities are only one part of a suite of disturbance vectors that shape forest conditions.

We developed and applied a spatial optimization algorithm to prioritize forest and fuel management treatments within a proposed linear fuel break network on a 0.5 million ha Western US national forest.

Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem.

Although humans have interacted with wildfires for millennia, a science-based approach to fire management has evolved in recent decades. This paper reviews the development of firemanagement research, focusing on publications that use this term in their title, abstract, or keywords identified on the Scopus platform.