Wildland fire incident commanders make wildfire response decisions within an increasingly complex socio-environmental context. Threats to human safety and property, along with public pressures and agency cultures, often lead commanders to emphasize full suppression.
Achieving sustainable coexistence with wildfires in the Anthropocene requires skilful integrated fire observations, fire behaviour predictions, forecasts of fire risk, and projections of change to fire climates.
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.
Background Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at landscape scales is a key research and management need given the inability to treat all areas at risk from wildfire. We synthesized information from case studies that documented the influence of fuel treatments on wildfire events.
Aim: Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single-day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities.
A century of fire suppression across the Western US has led to more crowded forests and increased competition for resources. Studies of forest thinning or stand conditions after mortality events have provided indirect evidence for how competition can promote drought stress and predispose forests to severe fire and/or bark beetle outbreaks.
Wildfire’s economic, ecological and social impacts are on the rise, fostering the realisation that business-as-usual fire management in the United States is not sustainable.
Wildland firefighting in the United States is a complex and costly enterprise. While there are strong seasonal signatures for fire occurrence in specific regions of the United States, spatiotemporal occurrence of wildfire activity can have high inter-annual variability.
Restoration of western dry forests in the USA often focuses on reducing fuel loads. In the range of the spotted owl, these treatments may reduce canopy cover and tree density, which could reduce preferred habitat conditions for the owl and other sensitive species.