Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 94
Research on Wildfires, Soil Erosion and Land Degradation in the XXI Century
Year: 2024
This study carries out a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scientific production on wildfires, soil erosion and land degradation, with the aim of understanding trends, critical gaps in scientific knowledge and research patterns. A total of 1400 articles published between 2001 and 2023 were analyzed with bibliometric tools (Bibliometrix and VOSviewer), revealing a steady growth in the number of publications over time. International collaboration between countries such as the United States, Spain, China and Portugal is evident, highlighting the global approach to tackling these issues, as…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire Research
Year: 2024
Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories. In short, our Peoples have always been data gatherers, and as this article presents, we are also fire data gatherers and stewards. Given the growing interest in fire research with Indigenous communities, there is an opportunity for guidance on data collection conducted equitably and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate resilience through ecocultural stewardship
Year: 2024
The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity. While there are many concepts of social and ecological resilience, the exemplar practices of Indigenous stewardship are recognized in having sustained Indigenous peoples and their countries for millennia and past climate change events. California has been at the crossroads of many of these issues, and the historic and current contributions of Indigenous peoples to addressing these provide an excellent study of ecocultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear
Year: 2024
Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire narratives: Identifying and characterizing multiple understandings of western wildfire challenges
Year: 2024
Western wildfires present a complex sustainability challenge characterized by more severe fires and escalating risks. To mitigate western wildfire risks, collaborative management practices need to transform the processes involved in knowledge production, seizing the opportunities and overcoming obstacles associated with actors’ multiple understandings. Knowledge co-production represents an increasingly referenced process for bringing together diverse actors, including scientists from different disciplines and non-scientists, to construct place-based and action-oriented knowledge. While…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cooperative Community Wildfire Response: Pathways to First Nations’ leadership and partnership in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2024
With the growing scale of wildfires, many First Nations are demanding a stronger role in wildfire response. Disproportionate impacts on Indigenous communities (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) in Canada are motivating these demands: although approximately 5% of the population identifies as Indigenous, about 42% of wildfire evacuation events occur communities that are more than half Indigenous. In what is now known as British Columbia, Canada, new pathways for cooperative wildfire response between First Nations and provincial agencies are emerging. Drawing from semi-structured…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How bureaucracies interact with Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS): a conceptual framework
Year: 2024
BackgroundIndigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS) is contested within settler-colonial contexts, where its development is shaped by complex and dynamic socio-cultural, legal, and political factors. This manuscript draws from the policy sciences to sketch out a “zone of interaction” between IFS and the state’s wildfire policy system. Drawing from the strategies of bureaucracies, our goal is to illustrate the patterns in this “zone of interaction,” and to identify the implications for IFS, as well as for Indigenous Peoples and landscapes.ResultsDrawing insights from the Australian and Canadian…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using culturally significant birds to guide the timing of prescribed fires in the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion
Year: 2023
Historically, wildfire and tribal burning practices played important roles in shaping ecosystems throughout the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion of northern California and southern Oregon. Over the past several decades, there has been increased interest in the application of fire for forest management through the implementation of prescribed fires within habitats that are used by a diversity of migrant and resident land birds. While many bird species may benefit from habitat enhancements associated with wildfires, cultural burning, and prescribed fire, individuals may face direct or indirect harm.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Futures
Year: 2023
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How social and ecological characteristics shape transaction costs in polycentric wildfire governance: insights from the Sequoia-Kings Canyon Ecosystem, California, USA
Year: 2023
Many contemporary social and ecological challenges in forested ecosystems (climate change, invasive species, wildland- urban interface development, and wildfires) span multiple jurisdictions and are characterized by complex patterns of social and ecological interdependencies. Increasing evidence suggests that interdependent risk can best be addressed by working across boundaries (jurisdictional, scalar, and expertise) by sharing information and cooperating in management activities. Polycentric governance has emerged as a framework to understand how multiple and overlapping centers of decision…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Solastalgia to Soliphilia: Cultural Fire, Climate Change, and Indigenous Healing
Year: 2023
Wildly destructive fires, wind driven through unmanaged and untended lands, take lives and homes and the solace of familiar places. Ash blankets the remains, trauma takes hold, but even when the smoke clears and communities begin to heal, there is a loss beyond words. These wildfires reveal the ways many are lacking relationships with the land. Without good relationships with our environments, we worsen the health of land, plants, and animals. In this article, we foreground the experiential richness of storytelling as we build upon previous publications in Ecopsychology, further…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Variable Support and Opposition to Fuels Treatments for Wildfire Risk Reduction: Melding Frameworks for Local Context and Collaborative Potential
Year: 2023
Fuels reduction projects are an increasing focus of policy, funding, and management actions aimed at reducing wildfire risk to human populations while improving landscape health. This research used in-depth interviews to explore variable support or opposition to three fuels-reduction projects occurring in the same region of north central Washington State, USA. Results indicate that differential support or opposition to each project stemmed from a unique combination of social factors operating in each locality (e.g., past history with fuels treatments, values for public land, environmental…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exceptional variability in historical fire regimes across a western Cascades landscape, Oregon, USA
Year: 2023
Detailed information about the historical range of variability in wildfire activity informs adaptation to future climate and disturbance regimes. Here, we describe one of the first annually resolved reconstructions of historical (1500–1900 ce) fire occurrence in coast Douglas-fir dominated forests of the west slope of the Cascade Range in western Oregon. Mean fire return intervals (MFRIs) across 16 sites within our study area ranged from 6 to 165 years. Variability in MFRIs was strongly associated with average maximum summer vapor pressure deficit. Fire occurred infrequently in Douglas-fir…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Shared Stewardship Strategy in the Southern United States: Lessons Learned
Year: 2023
The USDA Forest Service’s Shared Stewardship strategy, announced initially in 2018, is built on a vision of advancing federal partnerships with states and other entities to better accomplish shared forest management priorities at the landscape scale. Early implementation of the strategy provides a glimpse into how these partnership dynamics differ both among states and among geographic and jurisdictional regions. Building on a prior assessment of early Shared Stewardship implementation in the western states, this Brief Communication article provides insights from a parallel analysis in the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cultivating Collaborative Resilience to Social and Ecological Change: An Assessment of Adaptive Capacity, Actions, and Barriers Among Collaborative Forest Restoration Groups in the United States
Year: 2022
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 remain resilient to these disruptions remains under-explored. Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other CGRs. We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The right to burn: barriers and opportunities for Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge, significant barriers exist for re-engaging in cultural burning. Indigenous communities in Canada have unique vulnerabilities to large and high-intensity wildfires as they are predominately located in remote, forested regions and lack financial support at federal and provincial levels to mitigate wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Minimize the bad days: Wildland fire response and suppression success
Year: 2022
• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating. • By mobilizing a timely and safe initial response, early detection technologies, strategic networks of fuel breaks, and Rangeland Fire Protection Associations help “minimize the bad days” on the fireline and improve suppression…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Transforming fire governance in British Columbia, Canada: an emerging vision for coexisting with fire
Year: 2022
The dominant command and control fire governance paradigm is proven ineffective at coping with modern wildfire challenges. In response, jurisdictions globally are calling for transformative change that will facilitate coexisting with future fires. Enacting transformative change requires attention to historical governance attributes that may enable or constrain transformation, including diverse actors, objectives, worldviews of fire, decision-making processes and power, legislation, and drivers of change. To identify potential pathways for transformative change, we systematically examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Traditional Fire Knowledge: A Thematic Synthesis Approach
Year: 2022
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 their legacy of knowledge and subjective dimensions. Both indigenous fire management (IFM) and local fire management (LFM) are rooted in traditional fire knowledge and are among the most important contributions that rural communities can make to management partnerships. Focusing specifically on…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-Envisioning Wildland Fire Governance: Addressing the Transboundary, Uncertain, and Contested Aspects of Wildfire
Year: 2022
Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem. For instance, while wildfire is often described as a cross-boundary problem, understanding wildfire risk as transboundary highlights important political and institutional challenges that complicate collaboration across jurisdictions…
Publication Type: Journal Article