Research Database
Displaying 81 - 100 of 148
Burning without borders: Cooperatively managing wildfire risk in Northern Colorado
Year: 2020
Because wildfires don’t stop at ownership boundaries, managers from governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Northern Colorado are taking steps to pro-actively “co-manage” wildfire risk through the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative (NCFC). For this research project, co-management refers to the collective actions taken by organizations to share the resources, costs, and burdens associated with managing fire risk across a large landscape. We examine factors that facilitated and limited wildfire risk co-management in a case study of the NCFC.
Publication Type: Report
Pre-season fire management planning: the use of Potential Operational Delineations to prepare for wildland fire events
Year: 2020
US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives. PODs are a collaborative planning approach based on spatial analytics to identify potential wildfire control lines and assess the desirability of fire before ignition. They offer the opportunity to apply risk management principles with partners before the compressed timeframe of incident response. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tribes & Climate Change
Year: 2020
Native Americans rely on tribally important ecosystem services such as traditional foods, hunting, timber production, non-timber forest resources (recreation, water), and cultural resources. Unfortunately, many of these resources may be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A research team sought to answer the question: Where and which tribally-important ecosystem services will be affected by climate change in the Pacific Northwest? They used projections from climate and vegetation models and stakeholder input to demonstrate a generalizable approach for assessing possible…
Publication Type: Web project page
Joint Fire Science Program 2019 Progress Report
Year: 2020
Congress created the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) in 1998 as a partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to identify and fund the research needs of the fire management community. Since that time, the JFSP has provided leadership to the fire community by identifying high-priority wildland fire science research needs that will enhance the decision making ability of fire and fuels managers, natural resource managers, and others to meet their management objectives. This progress report highlights a small sample of those research…
Publication Type: Report
Potential COVID-19 Outbreak in Fire Camp: Modeling Scenarios and Interventions
Year: 2020
The global COVID-19 pandemic will pose unique challenges to the management of wildlandfire in 2020. Fire camps may provide an ideal setting for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virusthat causes COVID-19. However, intervention strategies can help minimize disease spread andreduce the risk to the firefighting community. We developed a COVID-19 epidemic model tohighlight the risks posed by the disease during wildland fire incidents. Our model accounts forthe transient nature of the population on a wildland fire incident, which poses unique risks to themanagement of communicable diseases in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West
Year: 2020
Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Walking through a "phoenix landscape": hiker surveys reveal nuanced perceptions of wildfire effects
Year: 2020
Public opinion of wildfire is often perceived to be negative and in support of fire suppression, even though research suggests public opinions have become more positive over the past few decades. However, most prior work on this topic has focused on homeowners in forested regions. In this study, we shift the lens to hikers in a chaparral- and oak-savannah-dominated landscape that burned at high severity in 2015. We surveyed hikers before and after their hike about their familiarity and perceptions of local fire, and wildfire in the nation at large. We found hikers were familiar with topics…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Policy tools to address scale mismatches: insights from U.S. forest governance
Year: 2019
Recent literature has highlighted the growing array of scale mismatches in environmental governance and offered policy design principles for improved governance approaches. A next step is to develop our understanding of specific policy tools that can address scale mismatches. This paper reviews the range and importance of scale-related challenges and solutions in environmental governance, situating this discussion in the context of forest governance. We then tackle the matter of policy tools to address scale mismatches, by synthesizing findings from recent policy research on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring the influence of local social context on strategies for achieving Fire Adapted Communities
Year: 2019
There is a growing recognition that the social diversity of communities at risk from wildland fire may necessitate divergent combinations of policies, programs and incentives that allow diverse populations to promote fire adapted communities (FACs). However, there have been few coordinated research efforts to explore the perceived utility and effectiveness of various options for FACs among residents, professionals, and local officials in disparate communities with different social contexts. The research presented here attempts to systematically explore the combination of local social factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cost-effective fuel treatment planning: a theoretical justification and case study
Year: 2019
Modelling the spatial prioritisation of fuel treatments and their net effect on values at risk is an important area for applied work as economic damages from wildfire continue to grow. We model and demonstrate a cost-effective fuel treatment planning algorithm using two ecosystem services as benefits for which fuel treatments are prioritised. We create a surface of expected fuel treatment costs to incorporate the heterogeneity in factors affecting the revenue and costs of fuel treatments, and then prioritise treatments based on a cost-effectiveness ratio to maximise the averted loss of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using mental models to understand trade-offs in wildfire risk mitigation
Year: 2019
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. As fire-prone landscapes become increasingly economically and culturally diverse, wildfire risk mitigation decisions have implications for a correspondingly broader set of values, resulting in greater potential for trade-offs (that is, actions that enhance some values but adversely affect others)....
Publication Type: Report
Fine scale assessment of cross boundary wildfire events in the Western US
Year: 2019
We report a fine scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events for the western US. We used simulation modeling to quantify the extent of fire exchange among major federal, state, and private land tenures and mapped locations where fire ignitions can potentially affect populated places. We examined how parcel size effects the wildfire transmission and partitioned the relative amounts of transmitted fire between human and natural ignitions. We estimated that almost 90 % of the total predicted wildfire activity as measured by area burned originates from four land tenures (Forest Service,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Statement of Common Ground Regarding the Role of Wildfire in Forested Landscapes of the Western United States
Year: 2018
Executive Summary: For millennia, wildfires have markedly influenced forests and non-forested landscapes of the western United States (US), and they are increasingly seen as having substantial impacts on society and nature. There is growing concern over what kinds and amounts of fire will achieve desirable outcomes and limit harmful effects on people and nature. Moreover, the increasing complexity surrounding cost and management of wildfires suggests that science should play a more prominent role in informing decisions about the need for fire in nature, and the need for society to adapt to…
Publication Type: Report
Where wildfires destroy buildings in the US relative to the wildland–urban interface and national fire outreach programs
Year: 2018
Over the past 30 years, the cost of wildfire suppression and homes lost to wildfire in the US have increased dramatically, driven in part by the expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where buildings and wildland vegetation meet. In response, the wildfire management community has devoted substantial effort to better understand where buildings and vegetation co-occur, and to establish outreach programs to reduce wildfire damage to homes. However, the extent to which the location of buildings affected by wildfire overlaps the WUI, and where and when outreach programs are established…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Key Findings and Messages from the Go Big or Go Home? Project
Year: 2018
About Go Big or Go Home?: The goals of this research project were to analyze how public land managers and stakeholders in Oregon’s east Cascades can plan and manage at landscape scales using scientific research and participatory simulation modeling (Envision).
Publication Type: Report
Cross-boundary cooperation for landscape management: Collective action and social exchange among individual private forest landowners
Year: 2018
The landscape is an ideal spatial extent for managing forests because many ecological processes and disturbances occur on such scales. Moreover, landscape-level decision-making processes can improve the efficiency of forest management, as when many owners of small parcels increase the economy of scale of their operations by jointly hiring labor or selling products. Despite the potential benefits of managing at the landscape level, cooperation on management activities across property boundaries is rare among private landowners and poorly understood. We used a comparative case study approach to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Escaping social-ecological traps through tribal stewardship on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, United States of America
Year: 2018
Tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America (USA) have long-standing relationships to ancestral lands now managed by federal land management agencies. In recent decades, federal and state governments have increasingly recognized tribal rights to resources on public lands and to participate in their management. In support of a new planning initiative to promote sustainable land management, we reviewed scientific publications to examine relationships between tribal social-ecological systems and public lands in the region. We identified key ecocultural resources,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Service Managers' Perception of Landscapes and Computer Models
Year: 2018
About Go Big or Go Home?: The goals of this research project were to analyze how public land managers and stakeholders in Oregon’s east Cascades can plan and manage at landscape scales using scientific research and participatory simulation modeling (Envision).
Publication Type: Report
Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in Temperate Forest Areas: New Measures of Exposure, Sensitivity, and Adaptive Capacity
Year: 2018
Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems. We developed a framework that measures social vulnerability to slow-onset climate-related changes in forest ecosystems. We focused on temperate forests because this biome is expected to experience dramatic change in the coming years, with adverse effects for humans. We advance…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Policy Design to Support Forest Restoration: The Value of Focused Investment and Collaboration
Year: 2018
To address rapid change and complex environmental management challenges, governance approaches must support collective action across actors and jurisdictions, and planning at appropriate spatial extents to affect ecological processes. Recent changes in U.S. national forest policy incorporate new tools to facilitate collaborative landscape restoration, providing an opportunity to examine the relationship between policy design and governance change. Based on 151 interviews with agency personnel and partners, and a survey of 425 agency staff members, we investigated how two new policy approaches…
Publication Type: Journal Article