The Dry Forest Investment Zone (DFIZ) is a five-year project to address common natural resource-based economic development challenges through increased networking and capacity building at a regional scale.
This Practical Guide is a companion to the video program Communication Strategies for Fire Management: Creating Effective Citizen-Agency Partnerships. The video is designed to assist land management personnel in working collaboratively with citizens for community fire and fuel reduction strategies.
The wildfires that ignited September 7-9, 2020 (collectively named the “Labor Day Fires”) on the west side of the Oregon Cascades (Westside) were a devastating reminder that these communities and forests are at risk from wildfires. The fires collectively burned more than 2.2 million acres, caused fatalities and billions of dollars in damage, placed more than 10% of the state’s residents under evacuation advisories, and created hazardous air quality conditions across the northwestern US. The fires left researchers, practitioners, and local residents questioning how to better expect and prepare for similar events in the future. The three articles summarized in this brief focused on the challenges of understanding and communicating about wildfire surprises and risk in Westside systems, and how to better predict where similar events might happen in the future. A fourth article summarizes the key meteorological drivers behind the Labor Day fires.
This annotated bibliography is collected from professional journals in natural resource management and sociology, conference proceedings, and technical reports.
Throughout much of the Pacific Northwest, the interplay between environmental and social change not only contributes to wildfire risk, but also complicates efforts to mitigate it.
Over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service to manage America’s 193-million acre national forests and grasslands for the benefit of all Americans.
Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leading some fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solely on the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI)communities.
Prior research suggests that Indigenous fire management buffers climate influences on wildfires, but it is unclear whether these benefits accrue across geographic scales.
This guidebook presents a menu of Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service tools and programs available to implement land stewardship on public and private lands, while providing insider tips and lessons learned.