Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 191
Short-term impacts of operational fuel treatments on modelled fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2025
Background: In response to increasing risk of extreme wildfire across western North America, forest managers are proactively implementing fuel treatments.Aims: We assessed the efficacy of alternative combinations of thinning, pruning and residue fuel management to mitigate potential fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of interior British Columbia, Canada.Methods: Across five community forests, we measured stand attributes before and after fuel treatments in 2021 and 2022, then modelled fire behaviour and effects using the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion quadruple the likelihood of extreme-impact wildfires in California
Year: 2025
Previous research has examined individual factors contributing to wildfire risk, but the compounding effects of these factors remain underexplored. Here, we introduce the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI)” to quantify the compounding effects of fire-weather intensification and anthropogenic factors—including ignitions and human settlement into wildland—on wildfire risk. While climatic trends increased the frequency of high-risk fire-weather by 2.5-fold, the combination of this trend with wildland-urban interface expansion led to a 4.1-fold increase in the frequency of…
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
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial resolution burned area information from two FEI…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Blending Indigenous and western science: Quantifying cultural burning impacts in Karuk Aboriginal Territory
Year: 2024
The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate. While there is increasing recognition of Indigenous fire stewardship among western scientists and managers, the extent and purpose of cultural burning is generally absent from the landscape–fire modeling literature and our understanding of ecosystem processes and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Socially vulnerable US Pacific Northwest communities are more likely to experience wildfires
Year: 2024
Quantitative wildfire risk assessments increasingly are used to prioritize areas for investments in wildfire risk mitigation actions. However, current assessments of wildfire risk derived from fire models built primarily on biophysical data do not account for socioeconomic contexts that influence community vulnerability to wildfire. Research indicates that despite accounting for only a small proportion of high wildfire hazard areas, communities with fewer socioeconomic resources to devote to wildfire prevention and response may experience outsized exposure and impacts. We examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation
Year: 2024
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Efficacy of Red Flag Warnings in Mitigating Human-Caused Wildfires across the Western United States
Year: 2024
Red flag warnings (RFWs) are issued by the U.S. National Weather Service to alert fire and emergency response agencies of weather conditions that are conducive to extreme wildfire growth. Distinct from most weather warnings that aim to reduce exposure to anticipated hazards, RFWs may also mitigate hazards by reducing the occurrence of new ignitions. We examined the efficacy of RFWs as a means of limiting human-caused wildfire ignitions. From 2006 to 2020, approximately 8% of wildfires across the western United States and 19% of large wildfires (≥40 ha) occurred on days with RFWs. Although the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human driven climate change increased the likelihood of the 2023 record area burned in Canada
Year: 2024
In 2023, wildfires burned 15 million hectares in Canada, more than doubling the previous record. These wildfires caused a record number of evacuations, unprecedented air quality impacts across Canada and the northeastern United States, and substantial strain on fire management resources. Using climate models, we show that human-induced climate change significantly increased the likelihood of area burned at least as large as in 2023 across most of Canada, with more than two-fold increases in the east and southwest. The long fire season was more than five times as likely and the large areas…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Resource objective wildfire leveraged to restore old growth forest structure while stabilizing carbon stocks in the southwestern United States
Year: 2024
Wildfire futures and aboveground carbon (C) dynamics associated with forest restoration programs that integrate resource objective wildfire as part of a larger treatment strategy are not well understood. Using simulation modeling, we examined alternative forest and fuel management strategies on a 237,218-ha study area within a 778,000-ha landscape that is a high priority target for federal restoration programs. We simulated two wildfire management scenarios combined with three levels of conventional forest restoration treatments over 64 years using a detailed landscape disturbance and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using focus groups for knowledge sharing: Tracking emerging pandemic impacts on USFS wildland fire operations
Year: 2024
In early 2020 the US Forest Service (USFS) recognized the need to gather real-time information from its wildland fire management personnel about their challenges and adaptations during the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. The USFS conducted 194 virtual focus groups to address these concerns, over 32 weeks from March 2020 to October 2020. This management effort provided an opportunity for an innovative practice-based research study. Here, we outline a novel methodological approach (weekly, iterative focus groups, with two-way communication between USFS staff and leadership), which culminated in a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire branding: Why do new residents make a burn scar their home?
Year: 2024
Researchers have sought to understand why wildland urban interface areas continue to expand in the United States despite increasing riskand loss to those areas. Using the case of the Camp Fire in northern California, which destroyed the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in the fall of 2018, this article explores how new arrivals to this area interact with rebuild institutions to evaluate their risk of future wildfires. The paper builds off of concepts of “disaster machine” (Pais and Elliott in Soc Forces 86(4):1415–1453, 2008) and “resilience gentrification” (Gould and Lewis, 2021…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predicting daily firefighting personnel deployment trends in the western United States
Year: 2024
Projected increases in wildfire frequency, size, and severity may further stress already scarce firefighting resources in the western United States that are in high demand. Machine learning is a promising field with the ability to model firefighting resource usage without compromising dataset size or complexity. In this study, the Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) model was used with historical (2012-2020) wildfire data to train three models that calculate predicted daily counts of 1) total assigned personnel (total personnel), 2) assigned personnel that are at the fire (ground personnel), and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fire placement matters more than increasing frequency and extent in a simulated Pacific Northwest landscape
Year: 2024
Prescribed fire has been increasingly promoted to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-adapted ecosystems. Yet, the complexities of forest ecosystem dynamics in response to disturbances, climate change, and drought stress, combined with myriad social and policy barriers, have inhibited widespread implementation. Using the forest succession model LANDIS-II, we investigated the likely impacts of increasing prescribed fire frequency and extent on wildfire severity and forest carbon storage at local and landscape scales. Specifically, we ask how much prescribed fire is required to maintain…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring How Community Context Informs Variations in Local Perceptions of Forest Disturbance and Land Management in Colorado Over Time
Year: 2024
Placed-based socio-economic and biophysical context has been viewed as an essential driver in shaping perceptions of forest risks and land management. Growing evidence of the importance of diverse community context in forested landscapes sets the stage to further consider how people’s understandings of their local environment influence natural resource management preferences. However, research to date largely lacks considerations of how community context informs social responses to long-term environmental change over time. Using the mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak in Colorado, we analyze…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests delays the decline of subalpine forests in the southwest United States under projected climate
Year: 2024
- In southwestern US forests, the combined impact of climate change and increased fuel loads due to more than a century of human-caused fire exclusion is leading to larger and more severe wildfires. Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests can mitigate high-severity fire risk, but the effects of these treatments on the vegetation composition and structure under projected climate change remain uncertain.
- We used a forest landscape model to assess the impact of thinning and prescribed burns in dry conifer forests across an elevation gradient, encompassing low-elevation…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Prescribed Burning, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
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
An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network
Year: 2024
We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire probability estimated from recent climate and fine fuels across the big sagebrush region
Year: 2024
BackgroundWildfire is a major proximate cause of historical and ongoing losses of intact big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities and declines in sagebrush obligate wildlife species. In recent decades, fire return intervals have shortened and area burned has increased in some areas, and habitat degradation is occurring where post-fire re-establishment of sagebrush is hindered by invasive annual grasses. In coming decades, the changing climate may accelerate these wildfire and invasive feedbacks, although projecting future wildfire dynamics requires a better…
Publication Type: Journal Article