Research Database
Displaying 81 - 100 of 135
Effectiveness of public health messaging and communication channels during smoke events: A rapid systematic review
Year: 2017
Exposure to smoke emitted from wildfire and planned burns (i.e., smoke events) has been associated with numerous negative health outcomes, including respiratory symptoms and conditions. This rapid review investigates recent evidence (post-2009) regarding the effectiveness of public health messaging during smoke events. The objectives were to determine the effectiveness of various communication channels used and public health messages disseminated during smoke events, for general and at-risk populations. A search of 12 databases and grey literature yielded 1775 unique articles, of which 10…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes
Year: 2017
Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland–urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. Although many plants, animals, and ecosystem services benefit from fire, it is unknown how ecosystems will respond to increased burning and warming. Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Diversity in forest management to reduce wildfire losses: implications for resilience
Year: 2017
This study investigates how federal, state, and private corporate forest owners in a fire-prone landscape of southcentral Oregon manage their forests to reduce wildfire hazard and loss to high-severity wildfire. We evaluate the implications of our findings for concepts of social–ecological resilience. Using interview data, we found a high degree of "response diversity" (variation in forest management decisions and behaviors to reduce wildfire losses) between and within actor groups. This response diversity contributed to heterogeneous forest conditions across the landscape and was driven…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Returning Fire to the Land—Celebrating Traditional Knowledge and Fire
Year: 2017
North American tribes have traditional knowledge about fire effects on ecosystems, habitats, and resources. For millennia, tribes have used fire to promote valued resources. Sharing our collective understanding of fire, derived from traditional and western knowledge systems, can benefit landscapes and people. We organized two workshops to investigate how traditional and western knowledge can be used to enhance wildland fire and fuels management and research. We engaged tribal members, managers, and researchers to formulate solutions regarding the main topics identified as important to tribal…
Publication Type: Journal Article
After the Fire Workshop: Connecting People, Ideas and Organizations
Year: 2017
Fire adaptation is about more than pre-fire work. It’s also about considering the needs of a community and the land post-fire. In Washington State, the last several fire seasons have given communities lots of opportunities to learn about post-fire recovery. Last month, members of organizations that work on community issues, landscape resilience and disaster-recovery gathered to share some of the things they’ve learned.
Publication Type: Report
Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California
Year: 2016
Increasingly, objectives for forests with moderate- or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland Pacific US, large, old, early seral trees were a key historical feature of many young and old forest successional patches, especially where fires frequently occurred. Large, old trees are naturally fire-tolerant, but today are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Scanning the Future of Wildfire: Resilience Ahead...Whether We Like It or Not?
Year: 2016
The field of so-called “futures research” provides researchers and stakeholders in a given subject area or system a way to map out and plan for alternate possible scenarios of the future. A recent research project supported by the Joint Fire Science Program brought together futures researchers and wildfire specialists to envision what the future holds for wildfire impacts and how the wildfire community may respond to the complex suite of emerging challenges. The consensus of the project’s foresight panel suggests that an era of resilience is ahead: but that this resilience may come either…
Publication Type: Report
REVIEW: Searching for resilience: addressing the impacts of changing disturbance regimes on forest ecosystem services
Year: 2016
The provisioning of ecosystem services to society is increasingly under pressure from global change. Changing disturbance regimes are of particular concern in this context due to their high potential impact on ecosystem structure, function and composition. Resilience-based stewardship is advocated to address these changes in ecosystem management, but its operational implementation has remained challenging. We review observed and expected changes in disturbance regimes and their potential impacts on provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting ecosystem services, concentrating on…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Risk terminology primer: Basic principles and a glossary for the wildland fire management community
Year: 2016
Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application. In response, this General Technical Report provides a set of clear, consistent, understandable, and usable definitions for terms associated with wildland fire risk management. The material presented herein is not brand-new or innovative per se, but rather synthesizes the extant science so that readers can readily make a crosswalk to the professional literature.…
Publication Type: Report
Outcomes of fire research: is science used?
Year: 2016
An assessment of outcomes from research projects funded by the Joint Fire Science Program was conducted to determine whether or not science has been used to inform management and policy decisions and to explore factors that facilitate use of fire science. In a web survey and follow-up phone interviews, I asked boundary spanners and scientists about how findings from a random sample of 48 projects had been applied and factors that acted as barriers or facilitators to science application. In addition, I conducted an investigation of recent planning documents to determine whether products from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing disturbance regimes, ecological memory, and forest resilience
Year: 2016
Ecological memory is central to how ecosystems respond to disturbance and is maintained by two types of legacies – information and material. Species life-history traits represent an adaptive response to disturbance and are an information legacy; in contrast, the abiotic and biotic structures (such as seeds or nutrients) produced by single disturbance events are material legacies. Disturbance characteristics that support or maintain these legacies enhance ecological resilience and maintain a “safe operating space” for ecosystem recovery. However, legacies can be lost or diminished as…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managed wildfire effects on forest resilience and water in the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2016
Fire suppression in many dry forest types has left a legacy of dense, homogeneous forests. Such landscapes have high water demands and fuel loads, and when burned can result in catastrophically large fires. These characteristics are undesirable in the face of projected warming and drying in the western US. Alternative forest and fire treatments based on managed wildfire—a regime in which fires are allowed to burn naturally and only suppressed under defined management conditions—offer a potential strategy to ameliorate the effects of fire suppression. Understanding the long-term effects of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Opportunities to utilize traditional phenological knowledge to support adaptive management of social-ecological systems vulnerable to changes in climate and fire regimes
Year: 2016
The field of adaptive management has been embraced by researchers and managers in the United States as an approach to improve natural resource stewardship in the face of uncertainty and complex environmental problems. Integrating multiple knowledge sources and feedback mechanisms is an important step in this approach. Our objective is to contribute to the limited literature that describes the benefits of better integrating indigenous knowledge (IK) with other sources of knowledge in making adaptive-management decisions. Specifically, we advocate the integration of traditional phenological…
Publication Type: Journal Article
U.S. federal fire and forest policy: emphasizing resilience in dry forests
Year: 2016
Current U.S. forest fire policy emphasizes short-term outcomes versus long-term goals. This perspective drives managers to focus on the protection of high-valued resources, whether ecosystem-based or developed infrastructure, at the expense of forest resilience. Given these current and future challenges posed by wildland fire and because the U.S. Forest Service spent >50% of its budget on fire suppression in 2015, a review and reexamination of existing policy is warranted. One of the most difficult challenges to revising forest fire policy is that agency organizations and decision making…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Patterns of conifer regeneration following high severity wildfire in ponderosa pine - dominated forests of the Colorado Front Range
Year: 2016
Many recent wildfires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson) - dominated forests of the western United States have burned more severely than historical ones, generating concern about forest resilience. This concern stems from uncertainty about the ability of ponderosa pine and other co-occurring conifers to regenerate in areas where no surviving trees remain. We collected post-fire conifer regeneration and other data within and surrounding five 11-18 year-old Colorado Front Range wildfires to examine whether high severity burn areas (i.e., areas without surviving trees)…
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
Employing resilience in the United States Forest Service
Year: 2016
The concept of resilience has permeated the discourse of many land use and environmental agencies in an attempt to articulate how to develop and implement policies concerned with the social and ecological dimensions of natural disturbances. Several distinct definitions of resilience exist, each with its own concepts, focus and contexts related to land use policy and management. This often makes understanding the inherent objectives of policies and related principles challenging. The United States Forest Service (USFS) is one example where ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding the use of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Toward a more ecologically informed view of severe forest fires
Year: 2016
We use the historical presence of high-severity fire patches in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States to make several points that we hope will encourage development of a more ecologically informed view of severe wildland fire effects. First, many plant and animal species use, and have sometimes evolved to depend on, severely burned forest conditions for their persistence. Second, evidence from fire history studies also suggests that a complex mosaic of severely burned conifer patches was common historically in the West. Third, to maintain ecological integrity in forests born of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Strengthening syntheses on fire: increasing their usefulness for managers
Year: 2015
A synthesis for fire managers summarizes and interprets a body of information, presents its meaning in an objective, unbiased way, and describes its implications for decisionmakers. Following are suggestions for ways to strengthen syntheses on fire and on other natural resource issues: Include managers, scientists, and science delivery specialists in planning, developing, and delivering syntheses; If a synthesis has unique regional components, include someone from each region in the planning team and consider these needs in writing and packaging; Use managers as authors, co-authors, or…
Publication Type: Report
Fuel and vegetation trends after wildfire in treated versus untreated forests
Year: 2015
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to increased interest in managing forests for resiliency to future disturbances. Comparing and contrasting treated versus untreated stands through multiple growing seasons postfire provide an opportunity to understand processes driving responses and can guide management decisions regarding resiliency. In treated and untreated forests, we compared fire effects 2‐10 growing seasons following fire on 3 different fires in New Mexico and Arizona. We estimated understory cover, standing crop, fuel loading, and basal area in (1) lop, pile, burn; (2…
Publication Type: Journal Article