Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 68
The western North American forestland carbon sink: will our climate commitments go up in smoke?
Year: 2025
Pathways to achieving net-zero and net-negative greenhouse-gas (GHG) emission targets rely on land-based contributions to carbon (C) sequestration. However, projections of future contributions neglect to consider ecosystems, climate change, legacy impacts of continental-scale fire exclusion, forest accretion and densification, and a century or more of management. These influences predispose western North American forests (wNAFs) to severe drought impacts, large and chronic outbreaks of insect pests, and increasingly large and severe wildfires. To realistically assess contributions of future…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA): A Machine Learning Based Fire Spread Prediction Model for Air Quality Forecasting Application
Year: 2025
Fire activities introduce hazardous impacts on the environment and public health by emitting various chemical species into the atmosphere. Most operational air quality forecast (AQF) models estimate smoke emissions based on the latest available satellite fire products, which may not represent real-time fire behaviors without considering fire spread. Hence, a novel machine learning (ML) based fire spread forecast model, the Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA), is developed for AQF model applications. FIRA aims to improve the performance of AQF models by providing realistic, dynamic fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Motivating parents to protect their children from wildfire smoke: the impact of air quality index infographics
Year: 2025
Background. Wildfire smoke events are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Children are especially vulnerable to health effects even at moderate smoke levels. However, it is unclear how parents respond to Air Quality Indices (AQIs) frequently used by agencies to communicate air pollution health risks. Methods. In an experiment (3 × 2 × 2 factorial design), 2,100 parents were randomly assigned to view one of twelve adapted AQI infographics that varied by visual (table, line, gauge), index type (AQI [0-500], AQHI [1-11+]), and risk…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Power and planning: a critical discourse analysis of tribal and non-tribal Oregon wildfire protection plans
Year: 2025
BackgroundSince the late 1800s, the US government has largely removed Indigenous fire stewardship practices from the landscape by implementing a top-down fire suppression system that criminalized traditional fire practices and denaturalized the role of fire in forested environments. A century of routine fire suppression produced dense, homogenous forests capable of sustaining high-intensity wildfire that exceeds the suppression capabilities of land management organizations in many regions, spurring federal leaders to modify management approaches. As part of this change,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governance of Indigenous data in open earth systems science
Year: 2025
In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights? The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), convened to address this question and envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research. Using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) as an example, the EDRWG recommends actions, applicable across all phases of the data lifecycle, that recognize the sovereign rights of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Air Quality Impacts of the January 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires: Insights from Public Data Sources
Year: 2025
Smoke from the Los Angeles (LA) wildfires that started on January 7, 2025 caused severe air quality impacts across the region. Government agencies released guidance on assessing personal risk, pointing to publicly available data platforms that present information from monitoring networks and smoke plume outlines. Additional satellite-based products provide supporting information during dynamic wildfire smoke events. We evaluate the regional air quality impacts of the fires through publicly available fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) observations from regulatory…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A tale of two fire systems: indigenous fire stewardship in British Columbia and California
Year: 2025
BackgroundAn increasing wildfire problem in western North America has created a policy space for Indigenous fire stewardship (IFS) to mitigate wildfire. We compare how British Columbia and California have supported IFS—two jurisdictions with distinct ecosystems but similar histories of colonialism and its socio-ecological consequences. We examine how IFS is incorporated into each jurisdiction’s institutional framework, and the barriers to, and opportunities for implementation.ResultsEach jurisdiction’s approach to recognizing IFS is shaped by different…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effect of Recent Prescribed Burning and Land Management on Wildfire Burn Severity and Smoke Emissions in the Western United States
Year: 2025
Wildfires in the western US increasingly threaten infrastructure, air quality, and public health. Prescribed (“Rx”) fire is often proposed to mitigate future wildfires, but treatments remain limited, and few studies quantify their effectiveness on recent major wildfires. We investigate the effects of Rx fire treatments on subsequent burn severity across western US ecoregions and particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions in California. Using high-resolution (30-m) satellite imagery, land management records, and fire emissions data, we employ a quasi-experimental design to compare Rx fire-treated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate Change Contributions to US Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 Mortality Between 2006-2020
Year: 2025
RATIONALE Wildfires have increased in frequency and intensity due to climate change and now contribute to nearly half of the annual average of fine particulate matter in the US. While the effects of short-term wildfire-PM2.5 exposure on respiratory diseases are well-described, the impact of climate change on longer duration wildfire-PM2.5 mortality is unknown. Our aim was to determine the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to wildfire smoke PM2.5 mortality on a county-level across the conterminous US between 2006-2020. METHODS We use an attribution model to compare observed wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bacterial Emission Factors: A Foundation for the Terrestrial-Atmospheric Modeling of Bacteria Aerosolized by Wildland Fires
Year: 2024
Wildland fire is a major global driver in the exchange of aerosols between terrestrial environments and the atmosphere. This exchange is commonly quantified using emission factors or the mass of a pollutant emitted per mass of fuel burned. However, emission factors for microbes aerosolized by fire have yet to be determined. Using bacterial cell concentrations collected on unmanned aircraft systems over forest fires in Utah, USA, we determine bacterial emission factors (BEFs) for the first time. We estimate that 1.39 × 1010 and 7.68 × 1011 microbes are emitted for each Mg of biomass consumed…
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
Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics
Year: 2024
Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls. This delineation revealed that rapidly increasing forest fire emissions in extratropical pyromes, linked to climate change, offset declining emissions in tropical pyromes during 2001 to 2023. Annual emissions tripled in one extratropical pyrome due to…
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
Indigenous Peoples' Rights Discourse: Toward Hemispheric Indigenous Climate and Environmental Justice
Year: 2024
In the face of global climate change, Indigenous communities around the world have increasingly gained recognition as significant actors in the fight for environmental justice and sustainability. This paper endeavors to explore the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews and environmental stewardship, while gesturing toward international policies rooted in both state apparatus and in indigenous grassroots efforts. Collectively, this work seeks to illuminate the action, implementation, and community work done by Indigenous Peoples that Hernandez [Binnizá & Maya Ch’orti’] (2022…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Untrammeling the wilderness: restoring natural conditions through the return of human-ignited fire
Year: 2024
Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes. Within many designated wilderness areas, this intentional exclusion of fire has clearly altered ecological processes and thus constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Through a framework that recognizes four orders of trammeling, we demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Application of the wildland fire emissions inventory system to estimate fire emissions on forest lands of the United States
Year: 2024
BackgroundForests are significant terrestrial biomes for carbon storage, and annual carbon accumulation of forest biomass contributes offsets affecting net greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The immediate loss of stored carbon through fire on forest lands reduces the annual offsets provided by forests. As such, the United States reporting includes annual estimates of direct fire emissions in conjunction with the overall forest stock and change estimates as a part of national greenhouse gas inventories within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Forest fire emissions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Strategic fire zones are essential to wildfire risk reduction in the Western United States
Year: 2024
BackgroundOver the last four decades, wildfires in forests of the continental western United States have significantly increased in both size and severity after more than a century of fire suppression and exclusion. Many of these forests historically experienced frequent fire and were fuel limited. To date, fuel reduction treatments have been small and too widely dispersed to have impacted this trend. Currently new land management plans are being developed on most of the 154 National Forests that will guide and support on the ground management practices for the next 15–20 years.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tribal stewardship for resilient forest socio-ecosystems
Year: 2024
The Yurok Tribe, along with other tribal communities in northwest California, non-profit organizations, universities, and governmental agencies are working to restore forests and woodlands to be more resilient to wildfires, drought, pests and diseases. Our current work within ancestral Yurok territory is designing and evaluating effects of forest treatments including fuels reduction, tree harvesting, and intentional burning based upon indigenous knowledge and associated traditional stewardship practices. Central to these evaluations are the potential availability, quantity, and quality of…
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
Generating fuel consumption maps on prescribed fire experiments from airborne laser scanning
Year: 2024
Background. Characterisation of fuel consumption provides critical insights into fire behaviour, effects, and emissions. Stand-replacing prescribed fire experiments in central Utah offered an opportunity to generate consumption estimates in coordination with other research efforts. Aims. We sought to generate fuel consumption maps using pre- and post-fire airborne laser scanning (ALS) and ground measurements and to test the spatial transferability of the ALSderived fuel models. Methods. Using random forest (RF), we empirically modelled fuel load and estimated consumption from pre-…
Publication Type: Journal Article