Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 113
Washington State 2020 Forest Action Plan
Year: 2020
Washington has more than 22 million acres of forestland. From the lush rainforests on our coasts, to the rugged sub-alpine forests along the Cascade Crest, to the pine-dominated hillsides surrounding the Columbia Plateau, forests are an integral part of our landscapes and communities, and they provide a wealth of benefits to Washingtonians and the planet. They provide us with sustainable timber and jobs, produce clean air and water, sequester carbon, and support world-class outdoor recreation. Our forests, however, face unprecedented threats that require bold action. Climate change is…
Publication Type: Government Report
Living with wildfire in Ashland, Oregon: 2020 Data Report
Year: 2020
Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leading some fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solely on the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI)communities. The core intent of this project was to build a partnership between the Wildfire Research (WiRē)Team and Ashland Fire and Rescue (AFR) by leveraging existing wildfire risk data collected in March 2018and pairing it with newly collected social data to better understand Ashland,…
Publication Type: Report
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
Rapid growth of the US wildland-urban interface raises wildfire risk
Year: 2018
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses and wildland vegetation meet or intermingle, and where wildfire problems are most pronounced. Here we report that the WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million; 41% growth) and land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 km2; 33% growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States. The vast majority of new WUI areas were the result of new housing (97%), not related to an increase in wildland vegetation. Within the perimeter of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Aligning environmental management with ecosystem resilience: a First Foods example from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, USA
Year: 2018
The concept of “reciprocity” between humans and other biota arises from the creation belief of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). The concept acknowledges a moral and practical obligation for humans and biota to care for and sustain one another, and arises from human gratitude and reverence for the contributions and sacrifices made by other biota to sustain human kind. Reciprocity has become a powerful organizing principle for the CTUIR Department of Natural Resources, fostering continuity across the actions and policies of environmental management programs at…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The full community costs of wildfire
Year: 2018
This report summarizes the accumulated impacts and associated costs of wildfires at the local, state, and federal level. Drawing from existing literature and five case studies—the Hayman (2002), Old, Grand Prix, and Padua Complex (2003), Schultz (2010), Rim (2013), and Loma fires (2016)—we categorize wildfire impacts into short-term expenses including suppression costs spent on firefighting, and long-term damages including costs that accrue in the months and years after a wildfire.
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
Wildfires managed for restoration enhance ecological resilience
Year: 2018
Expanding the footprint of natural fire has been proposed as one potential solution to increase the pace of forest restoration programs in fire‐adapted landscapes of the western USA. However, studies that examine the long‐term socio‐ecological trade‐offs of expanding natural fire to reduce wildfire risk and create fire resilient landscapes are lacking. We used the model Envision to examine the outcomes that might result from increased area burned by what we call “restoration” wildfire in a landscape where the ecological benefits of wildfire are known, but the need to suppress high‐risk fires…
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
Disequilibrium of fire-prone forests sets the stage for a rapid decline in conifer dominance during the 21st century
Year: 2018
The impacts of climatic changes on forests may appear gradually on time scales of years to centuries due to the long generation times of trees. Consequently, current forest extent may not reflect current climatic patterns. In contrast with these lagged responses, abrupt transitions in forests under climate change may occur in environments where alternative vegetation states are influenced by disturbances, such as fire. The Klamath forest landscape (northern California and southwest Oregon, USA) is currently dominated by high biomass, biodiverse temperate coniferous forests, but climate change…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Human presence diminishes the importance of climate in driving fire activity across the United States
Year: 2017
Growing human and ecological costs due to increasing wildfire are an urgent concern in policy and management, particularly given projections of worsening fire conditions under climate change. Thus, understanding the relationship between climatic variation and fire activity is a critically important scientific question. Different factors limit fire behavior in different places and times, but most fire-climate analyses are conducted across broad spatial extents that mask geographical variation. This could result in overly broad or inappropriate management and policy decisions that neglect to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bridging the divide between fire safety research and fighting fire safely: how do we convey research innovation to contribute more effectively to wildland firefighter safety?
Year: 2017
Creating a safe workplace for wildland firefighters has long been at the centre of discussion for researchers and practitioners. The goal of wildland fire safety research has been to protect operational firefighters, yet its contributions often fall short of potential because much is getting lost in the translation of peer-reviewed results to potential and intended users. When information that could enhance safety is not adopted by individuals, the potential to improve safety – to decipher the wildland fire physical or social environment and to recognise hazards – is lost. We use firefighter…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Towards improving wildland firefighter situational awareness through daily fire behaviour risk assessments in the US Northern Rockies and Northern Great Basin
Year: 2017
Wildland firefighters must assess potential fire behaviour in order to develop appropriate strategies and tactics that will safely meet objectives. Fire danger indices integrate surface weather conditions to quantify potential variations in fire spread rates and intensities and therefore should closely relate to observed fire behaviour. These indices could better inform fire management decisions if they were linked directly to observed fire behaviour. Here, we present a simple framework for relating fire danger indices to observed categorical wildland fire behaviour. Ordinal logistic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk associated with different vegetation types within and outside wildland-urban interfaces
Year: 2016
Wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) are areas where urban settlements and wildland vegetation intermingle, making the interaction between human activities and wildlife especially intense. Their relevance is increasing worldwide as they are expanding and are associated with fire risk. The WUI may affect the fire risk associated with the type of vegetation (land cover/land use; LULC), a well-known risk factor, due to differences in the type and intensity of human activities in different LULCs within and outside WUIs. No previous studies analyse this interaction between the effects of the WUI and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Facilitating knowledge transfer between researchers and wildfire practitioners about trust: An international case study
Year: 2016
The importance of knowledge transfer between researchers, policy makers and practitioners is widely recognized. However, barriers to knowledge transfer can make it difficult for practitioners to apply the results of scientific research. This paper describes a project that addressed barriers to knowledge transfer by involving wildfire management practitioners from three countries in developing a trust planning guide. The guide provides information about trust, factors that influence trust and actions that can be taken to build trust in the context of wildfire management. The researchers…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sources and implications of bias and uncertainty in a century of US wildfire activity data
Year: 2015
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a wealth of US wildfire activity data available for such analyses, but users must be aware of inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty in the data in order to maximise the integrity and utility of their work. Data for analysis are generally acquired from archival summary reports of the federal or interagency fire organisations; incident-level wildfire reporting systems of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Temperate forest health in an era of emerging megadisturbance
Year: 2015
Although disturbances such as fire and native insects can contribute to natural dynamics of forest health, exceptional droughts, directly and in combination with other disturbance factors, are pushing some temperate forests beyond thresholds of sustainability. Interactions from increasing temperatures, drought, native insects and pathogens, and uncharacteristically severe wildfire are resulting in forest mortality beyond the levels of 20th-century experience. Additional anthropogenic stressors, such as atmospheric pollution and invasive species, further weaken trees in some regions. Although…
Publication Type: Journal Article