Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 136
Boundary spanners catalyze cultural and prescribed fire in western Canada
Year: 2024
Western Canada is increasingly experiencing impactful and complex wildfire seasons. In response, there are urgent calls to implement prescribed and cultural fire as a key solution to this complex challenge. Unfortunately, there has been limited investment in individuals and organizations that can navigate this complexity and work to implement collaborative solutions across physical, cognitive, and social boundaries. In the wildfire context, these boundaries manifest as jurisdictional silos, a lack of respect for certain forms of knowledge, and a disconnect between knowledge and practice. Here…
Publication Type: Journal Article
‘Mind the Gap’—reforestation needs vs. reforestation capacity in the western United States
Year: 2024
Tree establishment following severe or stand-replacing disturbance is critical for achieving U.S. climate change mitigation goals and for maintaining the co-benefits of intact forest ecosystems. In many contexts, natural post-fire tree regeneration is sufficient to maintain forest cover and associated ecosystem services, but increasingly the pattern and scale of disturbance exceeds ecological thresholds and active reforestation may be warranted. Our capacity to plant trees, however, is not keeping pace with reforestation needs. This shortfall is uniquely apparent in the western U.S., where…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Developing reliable and valid measures for evaluating collaborative governance and adaptability: An example from the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program
Year: 2024
In recent decades, there has been an increased emphasis on, and application of, collaborative and adaptive forms of environmental governance as a means to address complex social-ecological problems that cannot be achieved alone and support sustainable resource management. However, the majority of research in the collaborative governance and adaptability arena has relied on individual or small-n case studies. This has led to a multitude of definitions, indicators, and indices, which limits our ability to make inferences across cases and contexts. Relatedly, most research lacks formal tests of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Improving social resilience to forest fire from community perspective
Year: 2024
Recently, terms like social and community resilience have provided new ideas in reducing disaster risks especially in forest fire. However, a comprehensive and in-depth review of community social resilience concerning forest fires is lacking. There is little research investigate whether certain social or community resilience factors can initiate forest fires or whether forest fire prevention positively be influenced by them. To fill this gap, this paper aims to identify and discuss the factors influencing the occurrence of forest fires in the scope of community social resilience. It also…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bridging scales for landscape-level wildfire adaptation: A case study of the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition
Year: 2024
Federal-level strategies or guidance for addressing wildfire risk encourage adaptation activities that span progressively larger scales, often focusing on landscape-level action that necessitates coordination between decision-makers and socially diverse communities. Collaborative organizations are increasingly explored as one approach for coordinating local efforts that address wildfire risk and adaptation, offering a platform for scaling and adjusting federal and state guidance that align with the needs of local landscapes. We conducted semi-structured interviews with members and supporters…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Consistent spatial scaling of high-severity wildfire can inform expected future patterns of burn severity
Year: 2023
Increasing wildfire activity in forests worldwide has driven urgency in understanding current and future fire regimes. Spatial patterns of area burned at high severity strongly shape forest resilience and constitute a key dimension of fire regimes, yet remain difficult to predict. To characterize the range of burn severity patterns expected within contemporary fire regimes, we quantified scaling relationships relating fire size to patterns of burn severity. Using 1615 fires occurring across the Northwest United States between 1985 and 2020, we evaluated scaling relationships within fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire-regime variability and ecosystem resilience over four millennia in a Rocky Mountain subalpine watershed
Year: 2023
- Wildfires strongly influence forest ecosystem processes, including carbon and nutrient cycling, and vegetation dynamics. As fire activity increases under changing climate conditions, the ecological and biogeochemical resilience of many forest ecosystems remains unknown.
- To investigate the resilience of forest ecosystems to changing climate and wildfire activity over decades to millennia, we developed a 4800-year high-resolution lake-sediment record from Silver Lake, Montana, USA (47.360° N, 115.566° W). Charcoal particles, pollen grains, element concentrations and stable…
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
Shaded fuel breaks create wildfire-resilient forest stands: lessons from a long-term study in the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2023
Background In California’s mixed-conifer forests, fuel reduction treatments can successfully reduce fire severity, bolster forest resilience, and make lasting changes in forest structure. However, current understanding of the duration of treatment effectiveness is lacking robust empirical evidence. We leveraged data collected from 20-year-old forest monitoring plots within fuel treatments that captured a range of wildfire occurrence (i.e., not burned, burned once, or burned twice) following initial plot establishment and overstory thinning and prescribed fire treatments. Results Initial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Terrestrial carbon dynamics in an era of increasing wildfire
Year: 2023
In an increasingly flammable world, wildfire is altering the terrestrial carbon balance. However, the degree to which novel wildfire regimes disrupt biological function remains unclear. Here, we synthesize the current understanding of above- and belowground processes that govern carbon loss and recovery across diverse ecosystems. We find that intensifying wildfire regimes are increasingly exceeding biological thresholds of resilience, causing ecosystems to convert to a lower carbon-carrying capacity. Growing evidence suggests that plants compensate for fire damage by allocating carbon…
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
The outsized role of California’s largest wildfires in changing forest burn patterns and coarsening ecosystem scale
Year: 2023
Highlights • We evaluated trends for 1,809 fires that burned 1985–2020 across California forests. • Top 1% of fires by size burned 47% of total area burned across the study period. • Top 1% (18 fires) produced 58% of high and 42% of low-moderate severity area. • Top 1% created novel landscape patterns of large burn severity patches. • These large fires create new opportunities for managing forest resilience. Although recent large wildfires in California forests are well publicized in media and scientific literature, their cumulative effects on forest structure and implications for forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community Forests advance local wildfire governance and proactive management in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2023
As wildfires are increasingly causing negative impacts to communities and their livelihoods, many communities are demanding more proactive and locally driven approaches to address wildfire risk. This marks a shift away from centralized governance models where decision-making is concentrated in government agencies that prioritize reactive wildfire suppression. In British Columbia (BC), Canada, Community Forests—a long-term, area-based tenure granted to Indigenous and/or local communities—are emerging as local leaders facilitating proactive wildfire management. To explore the factors that are…
Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Less fuel for the next fire? Short-interval fire delays forest recovery and interacting drivers amplify effects
Year: 2023
As 21st-century climate and disturbance dynamics depart from historic baselines, ecosystem resilience is uncertain. Multiple drivers are changing simultaneously, and interactions among drivers could amplify ecosystem vulnerability to change. Subalpine forests in Greater Yellowstone (Northern Rocky Mountains, USA) were historically resilient to infrequent (100–300 year), severe fire. We sampled paired short-interval (<30-year) and long-interval (>125-year) post-fire plots most recently burned between 1988 and 2018 to address two questions: (1) How do short-interval fire, climate,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Old reserves and ancient buds fuel regrowth of coast redwood after catastrophic fire
Year: 2023
For long-lived organisms, investment in insurance strategies such as reserve energy storage can enable resilience to resource deficits, stress or catastrophic disturbance. Recent fire in California damaged coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) groves, consuming all foliage on some of the tallest and oldest trees on Earth. Burned trees recovered through resprouting from roots, trunk and branches, necessarily supported by nonstructural carbon reserves. Nonstructural carbon reserves can be many years old, but direct use of old carbon has rarely been documented and never in such large, old trees.…
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
Climate change is narrowing and shifting prescribed fire windows in western United States
Year: 2023
Escalating wildfire activity in the western United States has accelerated adverse societal impacts. Observed increases in wildfire severity and impacts to communities have diverse anthropogenic causes—including the legacy of fire suppression policies, increased development in high-risk zones, and aridification by a warming climate. However, the intentional use of fire as a vegetation management tool, known as “prescribed fire,” can reduce the risk of destructive fires and restore ecosystem resilience. Prescribed fire implementation is subject to multiple constraints, including the number of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid fuel recovery after stand-replacing fire in closed-cone pine forests and implications for short-interval severe reburns
Year: 2023
Accelerating disturbance activity under a warming climate increases the potential for multiple disturbances to overlap and produce compound effects that erode ecosystem resilience — the capacity to experience disturbance without transitioning to an alternative state. A key concern is the potential for amplifying or attenuating feedbacks via interactions among successive, linked disturbance events. Following severe wildfires, fuel limitation is a negative feedback that may reduce the likelihood of subsequent fire. However, the duration of, and pre-fire vegetation effects on fuel limitation…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate influences on future fire severity: a synthesis of climate-fire interactions and impacts on fire regimes, high-severity fire, and forests in the western United States
Year: 2023
Background
Increases in fire activity and changes in fire regimes have been documented in recent decades across the western United States. Climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires across the western United States (US). Warming temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are altering western landscapes and making them more susceptible to high-severity fire. Increases in large patches of high-severity fire can result in significant impacts to landscape processes and ecosystem function…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Building water resilience in the face of cascading wildfire risks
Year: 2023
Severe wildfire is altering the natural and the built environment and posing risks to environmental and societal health and well-being, including cascading impacts to water systems and built water infrastructure. Research on wildfire-resilient water systems is growing but not keeping pace with the scale and severity of wildfire impacts, despite their intensifying threat. In this study, we evaluate the state of knowledge regarding wildfire-related hazards to water systems. We propose a holistic framework to assess interactions and feedback loops between water quality, quantity, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article