Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 185
Garden design can reduce wildfire risk and drive more sustainable co-existence with wildfire
Year: 2024
Destructive wildfire disasters are escalating globally, challenging existing fire management paradigms. The establishment of defensible space around homes in wildland and rural urban interfaces can help to reduce the risk of house loss and provide a safe area for residents and firefighters to defend the property from wildfire. Although defensible space is a well-established concept in fire management, it has received surprisingly limited scientific discussion. Here we reviewed guidelines on the creation of defensible space from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania. We…
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
Patterns, drivers, and implications of postfire delayed tree mortality in temperate conifer forests of the western United States
Year: 2024
Conifer forest resilience may be threatened by increasing wildfire activity and compound disturbances in western North America. Fire refugia enhance forest resilience, yet may decline over time due to delayed mortality—a process that remains poorly understood at landscape and regional scales. To address this uncertainty, we used high-resolution satellite imagery (5-m pixel) to map and quantify delayed mortality of conifer tree cover between 1 and 5 years postfire, across 30 large wildfires that burned within three montane ecoregions in the western United States. We used statistical models to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The geography of social vulnerability and wildfire occurrence (1984–2018) in the conterminous USA
Year: 2024
Wildfire is increasing in frequency, extent, and severity in many parts of the USA. Considering the unequal burden of natural hazards on socially vulnerable populations, we ask here, how are characteristics of social vulnerability associated with wildfire occurrence nationwide, at different scales and across differing levels of wildland–urban interface development? To answer this question, we first identify all non-urban census tracts in the USA that have experienced a wildfire since 1984. Using 26 different measures of social vulnerability, we compare these tracts to non-urban census tracts…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimising disaster response: opportunities and challenges with Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) technology in response to the 2020 Labour Day wildfires in Oregon, USA
Year: 2024
BackgroundThe expanding use of Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) technology in disaster response shows its immense potential to enhance emergency management. However, there is limited documentation on the challenges and data management procedures related to UAS operation.AimsThis manuscript documents and analyses the operational, technical, political, and social challenges encountered during the deployment of UAS, providing insights into the complexities of using these technologies in disaster situations.MethodsThis manuscript documents and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Thinning and Managed Burning Enhance Forest Resilience in Northeastern California
Year: 2024
Understanding and quantifying the resilience of forests to disturbances are increasingly important for forest management. Historical fire suppression, logging, and other land uses have increased densities of shade tolerant trees and fuel buildup in the western United States, which has reduced the resilience of these forests to natural disturbances. One way to mitigate this problem is to use fuel treatments such as stand thinning and prescribed burning. In this study, we investigated changes in forest structure in the Lassen and Plumas National Forests of northern California following a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating driving behavior patterns during wildfire evacuations in wildland-urban interface zones using connected vehicles data
Year: 2024
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire. Understanding the driving behavior of individuals to evacuate fire-affected WUI areas is important as the evacuees may encounter low visibility and difficult driving conditions due to burning material and steep topography. This study investigates the driving behavior patterns of individuals during historical wildfire events in rural and urban areas with mandatory evacuation orders using a connected vehicle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Stand diversity increases pine resistance and resilience to compound disturbance
Year: 2024
BackgroundDrought, fire, and insects are increasing mortality of pine species throughout the northern temperate zone as climate change progresses. Tree survival may be enhanced by forest diversity, with growth rates often higher in mixed stands, but whether tree defenses are likewise aided remains in question. We tested how forest diversity-productivity patterns relate to growth and defense over three centuries of climate change, competition, wildfire, and bark beetle attack. We used detailed census data from a fully mapped 25.6-ha forest dynamics plot in California, USA to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The impacts of rising vapour pressure deficit in natural and managed ecosystems
Year: 2024
An exponential rise in the atmospheric vapour pressure deficit (VPD) is among the most consequential impacts of climate change in terrestrial ecosystems. Rising VPD has negative and cascading effects on nearly all aspects of plant function including photosynthesis, water status, growth and survival. These responses are exacerbated by land–atmosphere interactions that couple VPD to soil water and govern the evolution of drought, affecting a range of ecosystem services including carbon uptake, biodiversity, the provisioning of water resources and crop yields. However, despite the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire management decisions outweigh mechanical treatment as the keystone to forest landscape adaptation
Year: 2024
BackgroundModern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative…
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
Unprotected lands: A case study of a wildland-urban interface community in “No-Man's land”
Year: 2023
There are areas of the United States that have no formalized fire protection. These lands are colloquially referred to as “no-man’s land” but are recognized by many land management agencies as unprotected lands. Unprotected lands are generally rural landscapes and exist in areas that are sparsely populated and lack formalized fire protection. In some cases, lands that are designated as wildland-urban interface are comprised of significant portions of unprotected lands. Currently, there has been little in the way of research completed that pertains to the overall amount of land that is…
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
Evaluating driving behavior patterns during wildfire evacuations in wildland-urban interface zones using connected vehicles data
Year: 2023
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire. Understanding the driving behavior of individuals to evacuate fire-affected WUI areas is important as the evacuees may encounter low visibility and difficult driving conditions due to burning material and steep topography. This study investigates the driving behavior patterns of individuals during historical wildfire events in rural and urban areas with mandatory evacuation orders using a connected vehicle…
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
Homeowner firewise behaviors in fire-prone central Oregon: An exploration of the attitudinal, situational, and cultural worldviews impacting pre-fire mitigation actions Author links open overlay panel
Year: 2023
Highlights • People with egalitarian cultural traits are more likely to engage in fire mitigation behaviors. • Concern, experience, and proximity all have a positive relationship to engagement in fire mitigation behaviors. • Fire-resistant building materials and landscaping requirements are effective policy tools for homeowner mitigation actions. • Younger homeowners and women are more likely to engage in fire mitigation actions. Abstract As a result of climate change and past management practices, wildfires are becoming larger and occurring more frequently than ever before in the Western U.S…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Face-to-face with scorching wildfire: potential toxicant exposure and the health risks of smoke for wildland firefighters at the wildland-urban interface
Year: 2023
As wildfire risks have elevated due to climate change, the health risks that toxicants from fire smoke pose to wildland firefighters have been exacerbated. Recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has reclassified wildland firefighters’ occupational exposure as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1). Wildfire smoke contributes to an increased risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease, yet wildland firefighters have inadequate respiratory protection. The economic cost of wildland fires has risen concurrently, as illustrated by the appropriation of $45 billion for wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Identifying building locations in the wildland–urban interface before and after fires with convolutional neural networks
Year: 2023
Background: Wildland–urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated owing to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown. Additionally, CNNs are computationally intensive and technically complex, making them challenging for end-users, such as those who use or create WUI maps, to apply. Aims: We identified buildings pre- and post-wildfire and estimated building destruction for three California wildfires: Camp, Tubbs and Woolsey.…
Publication Type: Journal Article