Research Database
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10
Understanding rural adaptation to smoke from wildfires and forest management: insights for aligning approaches with community contexts
Year: 2025
Background: Rural communities are increasingly impacted by smoke produced by wildfires and forest management activties. Understanding local influences on smoke adaptation and mitigation is critical to social adaptation as fire risk continues to rise.Aims: We sought to determine the role of local social context in smoke adaptation and gauge interest in adaptation strategies that might reduce exposure.Methods: We conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with 56 residents and professionals in Parks, Arizona, USA, a rural community adjacent to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trajectories of community fire adaptation: Social diversity, social fragmentation and the temporal evolution of wildfire action
Year: 2025
There is increasing acknowledgement that the unique characteristics (i.e., social contexts) of human communities influence variable means for adapting to the growing risks posed by wildland fire. However, there has been less work documenting how community social contexts evolve over time, and the ways they might influence collective mitigations pursued in partnership with professionals when addressing wildfire planning. We conducted 73 semi-structured interviews with 112 residents, emergency management professionals, government officials and members of community organizations in two Nevada…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Farming and ranching through wildfire: Producers’ critical role in fire risk management and emergency response
Year: 2025
Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023. Main findings show that wildfires’ impacts on producers are extensive and range from mild to catastrophic, with both short and long-term repercussions, regardless of their exposure level. Producers play a central role in community emergency wildfire risk response and management by reducing fuel loads, creating defensible space, and leveraging their fire management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effects of long-term ecological research and cognitive biases on the evaluation of scientific information by public land managers in Oregon and Washington, USA
Year: 2025
Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access. Barriers, such as paywalls, insufficient capacity, and information overload play an important role in determining what scientific information managers have access and attend to. Additionally, characteristics of managers themselves also influence what scientific information they prioritize and implement. Specific factors likely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Integrated fire management as an adaptation and mitigation strategy to altered fire regimes
Year: 2025
Altered fire regimes are a global challenge, increasingly exacerbated by climate change, which modifies fire weather and prolongs fire seasons. These changing conditions heighten the vulnerability of ecosystems and human populations to the impacts of wildfires on the environment, society, and the economy. The rapid pace of these changes exposes significant gaps in knowledge, tools, technology, and governance structures needed to adopt informed, holistic approaches to fire management that address both current and future challenges. Integrated Fire Management is an approach that combines fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Household needs among wildfire survivors in the 2017 Northern California wildfires
Year: 2025
Wildfires are impacting communities globally, with California wildfires often breaking records of size and destructiveness. Knowing how communities are affected by these wildfires is vital to understanding recovery. We sought to identify impacted communities' post-wildfire needs and characterize how those needs change over time. The WHAT-Now study deployed a survey that was made publicly available for communities affected by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires or the accompanying smoke at beginning approximately four months post-fire with the vast majority completed by nine months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Roof renewal disparities widen the equity gap in residential wildfire protection
Year: 2025
Wildfires are having disproportionate impacts on U.S. households. Notably, in California, over half of wildfire-destroyed homes (54%) are in low-income areas. We investigate the relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire community preparedness using building permits from 16 counties in California with 2.9 million buildings (2013–2021) and the U.S. government’s designation of disadvantaged communities (DACs), which classifies a census tract as a DAC if it meets a threshold for certain burdens, such as climate, environmental, and socio-economic. Homes located in DACs are 29% more…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Patterns and trends of heat and wildfire smoke indicators across rural–urban and social vulnerability gradients in Idaho
Year: 2025
Climate change poses a grave threat to human health with disparate impacts across society. While populations with high social vulnerability generally bear a larger burden of exposure to and impact from environmental hazards; such patterns and trends are less explored at the confluence of social vulnerability and rural–urban gradients. We show that in rural regions in Idaho, low vulnerability populations had both the highest long-term average and the highest increase rate of exposure to heatwaves from 2002–2020, coincident with a higher population density in low—as compared to high—…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Location, Location, Location: The Influence of Local Social Complexity on Risk Reduction Strategies in a WUI Settlement
Year: 2025
This research builds from existing scholarship to highlight the important role social complexity plays on managing and mitigating wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface. Researchers employed in-depth interviews to uncover similarities and differences in land and wildfire management preferences among what would appear to many to be a relatively homogenous population in a valley on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah. In spite of demographic similarities, researchers found meaningful and complex differences with regard to the local social context of subpopulations within the drainage.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Equity in resilience: a case study of community resilience to wildfire in southwestern Oregon, United States
Year: 2025
In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system. Marginalized communities are often most affected and least prepared for disturbances of this kind, where racism, colonialism, and structural equities prevent meaningful inclusion and equitable allocation of resources. This research centers these voices in an empirical study of the situated resilience of the Rogue River Basin, rooted in the work of community-based organizations…
Publication Type: Journal Article