Topic: Social and Community Impacts of Fire

Oregon Health Authority and the University of Oregon partnered to conduct a survey-based evaluation of wildfire smoke communications and impacts experienced by Oregon residents during the 2020 wildfire season. The purpose of this survey was to (1) understand how Oregonians respond to wildfire…

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. Public land managers use various strategies for managing landscape conditions that can affect wildfire,…

Human use and management of fire in landscapes have a long history and vary globally in purpose and impact. Existing local research on how people use and manage fire is fragmented across multiple disciplines and is diverse in methods of data collection and analysis. If progress is to be made on…

Knowledge coproduction is increasingly advocated as a way to address complex socioecological issues, such as catastrophic wildfires. In turn, attention has been paid to boundary organizations to foster knowledge coproduction. Despite this growing interest, little research has examined the…

Building fire-adaptive communities and fostering fire-resilient landscapes have become two of the main research strands of wildfire science that go beyond strictly biophysical viewpoints and call for the integration of complementary visions of landscapes and the communities living there, with…

Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. These growing impacts have prompted a paradigm shift toward proactive wildfire management that prioritizes prevention and preparedness instead of response. Despite this shift, many communities…

Since their introduction two decades ago, Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) have become a common planning tool for improving community preparedness and risk mitigation in fire-prone regions, and for strengthening coordination among federal and state land management agencies, local…

Larger and more severe wildfires are becoming more frequent and impacting different communities and human settlements. Much of the scientific literature and media on wildfires has focused on area of ecosystems burned and numbers of structures destroyed. Equally unprecedented, but often less…

Collaboration is increasingly emphasized as a tool to realize national-level policy goals in public lands management. Yet, collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are nested within traditional bureaucracies and are affected by internal and external disruptions. The extent to which CGRs adapt and…

This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of…