Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 95
Towards an Integrated Approach to Wildfire Risk Assessment: When, Where, What and How May the Landscapes Burn
Year: 2023
This paper presents a review of concepts related to wildfire risk assessment, including the determination of fire ignition and propagation (fire danger), the extent to which fire may spatially overlap with valued assets (exposure), and the potential losses and resilience to those losses (vulnerability). This is followed by a brief discussion of how these concepts can be integrated and connected to mitigation and adaptation efforts. We then review operational fire risk systems in place in various parts of the world. Finally, we propose an integrated fire risk system being developed under the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Engagement in local and collaborative wildfire risk mitigation planning across the western U.S.—Evaluating participation and diversity in Community Wildfire Protection Plans
Year: 2022
Since their introduction two decades ago, Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) have become a common planning tool for improving community preparedness and risk mitigation in fire-prone regions, and for strengthening coordination among federal and state land management agencies, local government, and residents. While CWPPs have been the focus of case studies, there are limited large-scale studies to understand the extent of, and factors responsible for, variation in stakeholder participation—a core element of the CWPP model. This article describes the scale and scope of participation in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Construction of Probabilistic Wildfire Risk Estimates for Individual Real Estate Parcels for the Contiguous United States
Year: 2022
The methodology used by the First Street Foundation Wildfire Model (FSF-WFM) to compute estimates of the 30-year, climate-adjusted aggregate wildfire hazard for the contiguous United States at 30 m horizontal resolution is presented. The FSF-WFM integrates several existing methods from the wildfire science community and implements computationally efficient and scalable modeling techniques to allow for new high-resolution, CONUS-wide hazard generation. Burn probability, flame length, and ember spread for the years 2022 and 2052 are computed from two ten-year representative Monte Carlo…
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
Improving wildfire management outcomes: shifting the paradigm of wildfire from simple to complex risk
Year: 2022
Numerous wildfire management agencies and institutions rely primarily on simple risk approaches to wildfire that focus on technical risk assessments that do not reflect the complexity of contemporary wildfire risk. This review paper argues that such insufficiently complex conceptualizations of risk, which do not account for the social and ecological diversity of fire-prone areas, are key contributors to the continued wildfire dilemma. We discuss distinctions between approaching wildfire as a simple and a complex risk and illuminate the need for expanded and complimentary ways to further fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governing wildfires: toward a systematic analytical framework
Year: 2022
Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Potential operational delineations: new horizons for proactive, risk-informed strategic land and fire management
Year: 2022
Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations. Early evidence suggests PODs provide utility for planning, communication, coordination, prioritization, incident response strategy development, and fuels mitigation and forest restoration. Recent legislative action codifies the importance of PODs by devoting…
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
Exploring relationships between perceived suppression capabilities and resident performance of wildfire mitigations
Year: 2022
Increased wildfire activity has led to renewed interest in enhancing local capacity to reduce wildfire risk in residential areas. Local fire departments (LFDs) are often the first responders to rural wildfires. However, LFDs may also struggle to address service demands in the growing wildland urban interface, including increasing numbers of wildfire incidents and changes in area socio-demographics (e.g., aging populations) or culture (e.g., decreasing volunteerism, new residents). We used a mixed-mode survey (n = 770) to explore rural perceptions of various fire service organizations (FSOs),…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The US Forest Service Life First safety initiative: exploring unnecessary exposure to risk
Year: 2022
In 2016, the US Forest Service initiated small-group safety discussions among members of its wildland firefighting organisation. Known as the Life First National Engagement Sessions, the discussions presented an opportunity for wildland firefighters to address systemic and cultural dysfunctions in the wildland fire system. The Life First initiative included a post-engagement survey in which more than 2600 Forest Service employees provided open-ended feedback. In that qualitative subset of results, survey respondents described four main situations in which wildland firefighters commonly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Towards a systemic approach to fire risk management
Year: 2022
Fire risk management is at a crossroads. The last three fire seasons worldwide, dotted by extreme fire behavior and “megafire” events, highlighted the need for a shifting mentality towards a novel and integrated fire management framework, flexible, adaptive, and responsive to the changing environmental and societal conditions. In this context, the pandemic outbreak added other elements of concern due to its impacts on fire management. The health crisis shined also a spotlight on the government’s capacity to manage interconnected risks and anticipatory risk management and the urgent need to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community Engagement With Proactive Wildfire Management in British Columbia, Canada: Perceptions, Preferences, and Barriers to Action
Year: 2022
Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. These growing impacts have prompted a paradigm shift toward proactive wildfire management that prioritizes prevention and preparedness instead of response. Despite this shift, many communities remain unprepared for wildfires in the WUI due to diverse individual and social-political factors influencing engagement with proactive management approaches. The catastrophic fire seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2021 in British Columbia (BC), Canada, highlighted just how vulnerable communities continue to be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Actionable social science can guide community level wildfire solutions. An illustration from North Central Washington, US
Year: 2022
In this study we illustrate the value of social data compiled at the community scale to guide a local wildfire mitigation and education effort. The four contiguous fire-prone study communities in North Central Washington, US, fall within the same jurisdictional fire service boundary and within one US census block group. Across the four communities, similar attitudes toward wildfire were observed. However, significant differences were found on the measures critical to tailoring wildfire preparation and mitigation programs to the local context such as risk mitigation behaviors, reported…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A quantitative wildfire risk assessment using a modular approach of geostatistical clustering and regionally distinct valuations of assets—A case study in Oregon
Year: 2022
The intensity and scale of wildfires has increased throughout the Pacific Northwest in recent decades, especially within the last decade, destroying vast amounts of valuable resources and assets. This trend is predicted to remain or even magnify due climate change, growing population, increased housing density. Furthermore, the associated stress of prolonged droughts and change in land cover/land use puts more population at risk. We present results of a multi-phase Extension Fire Program Initiative combining fire model results based on worst-case meteorological conditions recorded at 50…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors Influencing Risk during Wildfires: Contrasting Divergent Regions in the US
Year: 2022
(1) Background: Federal land managers in the US are charged with risk-based decisionmaking which requires them to know the risk and to direct resources accordingly. Without understanding the specific factors that produce risk, it is difficult to identify strategies to reduce it. (2) Methods: Risk characterized by U.S. land managers during wildfires was evaluated from 2010–2017 to identify factors driving risk perceptions. Annotation from 282 wildfires in two regions with distinctive risk profiles, the Northwest and Southwest Geographic Areas, were qualitatively coded using the risk assessment…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Stop going around in circles: towards a reconceptualisation of disaster risk management phases
Year: 2021
Purpose The way that disasters are managed, or indeed mis-managed, is often represented diagrammatically as a “disaster cycle”. The cyclical aspects of the disaster (risk) management concept, comprised of numerous operational phases, have, in recent years, been criticised for conceptualising and representing disasters in an overly simplistic way that typically starts with a disaster “event” – and subsequently leads onto yet another disaster. Such cyclical thinking has been proven to not be very useful for the complexities associated with understanding disasters and their risks. This paper…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Hazards of Risk: Identifying Plausible Community Wildfire Disasters in Low-Frequency Fire Regimes
Year: 2021
Optimized wildfire risk reduction strategies are generally not resilient in the event of unanticipated, or very rare events, presenting a hazard in risk assessments which otherwise rely on actuarial, mean-based statistics to characterize risk. This hazard of actuarial approaches to wildfire risk is perhaps particularly evident for infrequent fire regimes such as those in the temperate forests west of the Cascade Range crest in Oregon and Washington, USA (“Westside”), where fire return intervals often exceed 200 years but where fires can be extremely intense and devastating. In this study, we…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Roads and Operational Wildfire Response Planning
Year: 2021
Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations. Of interesthere is how road networks directly support fire control operations, and how managers incorporatethat information into pre-season assessment and planning. In this communication we briefly reviewand illustrate how forest roads relate to recent advances in operationally focused wildfire decisionsupport. We focus on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and Forests in the 21st Century: Managing Resilience Under Changing Climates and Fire Regimes in USA Forests
Year: 2021
Higher temperatures, lower snowpacks, drought, and extended dry periods have contributed to increased wildfire activity in recent decades. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of large fires, the cumulative area burned, andfire suppression costs and risks in many areas of the USA. Fire regimes are likely to change due to interactions among climate, fire, and other stressors and disturbances; resulting in persistent changes in forest structure and function. The remainder of the twenty-first century will present substantial challenges, as natural resource managers are faced with…
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Wildfire risk science facilitates adaptation of fire-prone social-ecological systems to the new fire reality
Year: 2020
Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires. However, a myriad of human and ecological factors constrain adaptation, and existing science-based management strategies are not sufficient to address fire as both a problem and solution. To that end, we present a novel risk-science approach that aligns wildfire response decisions, mitigation opportunities, and land management objectives by consciously integrating…
Publication Type: Journal Article