Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 308
Indigenous Fire Futures
Year: 2023
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using PODs to integrate fire and fuels planning
Year: 2023
BackgroundPotential Wildfire Operational Delineations (PODs) were developed as a pre-season planning tool to promote safe and effective fire response. Past research on PODs has identified uses in an incident management context. There has been little research on how PODs are being utilised in non-incident management contexts to align forest and wildfire planning objectives.AimsWe sought to understand how actors are adopting and adapting the PODs framework to inform non-incident management, and to identify facilitators, barriers and recommendations.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metal toxin threat in wildland fires determined by geology and fire severity
Year: 2023
Accentuated by climate change, catastrophic wildfires are a growing, distributed global public health risk from inhalation of smoke and dust. Underrecognized, however, are the health threats arising from fire-altered toxic metals natural to soils and plants. Here, we demonstrate that high temperatures during California wildfires catalyzed widespread transformation of chromium to its carcinogenic form in soil and ash, as hexavalent chromium, particularly in areas with metal-rich geologies (e.g., serpentinite). In wildfire ash, we observed dangerous levels (327-13,100 µg kg−1) of reactive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fire after thinning increased resistance of sub-Mediterranean pine forests to drought events and wildfires
Year: 2023
Vegetation structure affects the vulnerability of a forest to drought events and wildfires. Management decisions, such as thinning intensity and type of understory treatment, influence competition for water resources and amount of fuel available. While heavy thinning effectively reduces tree water stress and intensity of a crown fire, the duration of these benefits may be limited by a fast growth response of the understory. Our aim was to study the effect of forest structure on pine forests vulnerability to extreme drought events and on the potential wildfire behaviour after management, with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed Burns as a Tool to Mitigate Future Wildfire Smoke Exposure: Lessons for States and Rural Environmental Justice Communities
Year: 2023
Smoke from wildfires presents one of the greatest threats to air quality, public health, and ecosystems in the United States, especially in the West. Here we quantify the efficacy of prescribed burning as an intervention for mitigating smoke exposure downwind of wildfires across the West during the 2018 and 2020 fire seasons. Using the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model, we calculate the sensitivities of population-weighted smoke concentrations in receptor regions, including states and rural environmental justice communities, to fire emissions upwind of the receptors. We find…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How Does Fire Suppression Alter the Wildfire Regime? A Systematic Review
Year: 2023
Fire suppression has become a fundamental approach for shaping contemporary wildfire regimes. However, a growing body of research suggests that aggressive fire suppression can increase high-intensity wildfires, creating the wildfire paradox. Whether the strategy always triggers the paradox remains a topic of ongoing debate. The role of fire suppression in altering wildfire regimes in diverse socio-ecological systems and associated research designs demands a deeper understanding. To reconcile these controversies and synthesize the existing knowledge, a systematic review has been conducted to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study
Year: 2023
Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—areincreasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communitiesin fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporatepyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animaldistributionsandabundancetosupportpost-firemanagement.Weusetheblack-backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study todemonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitatassessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A data‐driven analysis and optimization of the impact of prescribed fire programs on wildfire risk in different regions of the USA
Year: 2023
In the current century, wildfires have shown an increasing trend, causing a huge amount of direct and indirect losses in society. Different methods and efforts have been employed to reduce the frequency and intensity of the damages, one of which is implementing prescribed fires. Previous works have established that prescribed fires are effective at reducing the damage caused by wildfires. However, the actual impact of prescribed fire programs is dependent on factors such as where and when prescribed fires are conducted. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven model studying the impact…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rethinking the focus on forest fires in federal wildland fire management: Landscape patterns and trends of non-forest and forest burned area
Year: 2023
For most of the 20th century and beyond, national wildland fire policies concerning fire suppression and fuels management have primarily focused on forested lands. Using summary statistics and landscape metrics, wildfire spatial patterns and trends for non-forest and forest burned area over the past two decades were examined across the U.S, and federal agency jurisdictions. This study found that wildfires burned more area of non-forest lands than forest lands at the scale of the conterminous and western U.S. and the Department of Interior (DOI). In an agency comparison, 74% of DOI burned area…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring and Testing Wildfire Risk Decision-Making in the Face of Deep Uncertainty
Year: 2023
We integrated a mechanistic wildfire simulation system with an agent-based landscape change model to investigate the feedbacks among climate change, population growth, development, landowner decision-making, vegetative succession, and wildfire. Our goal was to develop an adaptable simulation platform for anticipating risk-mitigation tradeoffs in a fire-prone wildland–urban interface (WUI) facing conditions outside the bounds of experience. We describe how five social and ecological system (SES) submodels interact over time and space to generate highly variable alternative futures even within…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social Vulnerability in USCommunities Affected by WildfireSmoke, 2011 to 2021
Year: 2023
Objectives. To describe demographic and social characteristics of US communities exposed to wildfire smoke.
Methods. Using satellite-collected data on wildfire smoke with the locations of population centers in the coterminous United States, we identified communities potentially exposed to light-, medium-, and heavy-density smoke plumes for each day from 2011 to 2021. We linked days of exposure to smoke in each category of smoke plume density with 2010 US Census data and community characteristics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index to describe…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of smoke modelling tools used to mitigate air quality impacts from prescribed burning
Year: 2023
Background. Prescribed fire is a land management tool used extensively across the United States. Owing to health and safety risks, smoke emitted by burns requires appropriate manage- ment. Smoke modelling tools are often used to mitigate air pollution impacts. However, direct comparisons of tools’ predictions are lacking. Aims. We compared three tools commonly used to plan prescribed burning projects: the Simple Smoke Screening Tool, VSmoke and HYSPLIT. Methods. We used each tool to model smoke dispersion from prescribed burns conducted by the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation…
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
Environmental justice analysis of wildfire-related PM2.5 exposure using low-cost sensors in California
Year: 2023
Highlights • Wildfire may exacerbate health disparities & environmental justice concerns. • Low-cost PM2.5 sensors improve wildfire impact assessment. • Increases in PM2.5 correlate with wildfire activity (within 30 km). • Indoor increases in PM2.5 concentrations mimic outdoor PM2.5 increase patterns. The increasing number and severity of wildfires is negatively impacting air quality for millions of California residents each year. Community exposure to PM2.5 in two main population centers (San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles County area) was assessed using the low-cost PurpleAir sensor…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exposure to wildfires and health outcomes of vulnerable people: Evidence from US data
Year: 2023
This paper investigates the causal effect of wildfire exposure on birth outcomes and older people’s health outcomes in United States (US). The study focuses on three sub-questions for each health outcome: (1) the causal effect of each of the five largest wildfires on individual health, (2) the causal impact of multiple large wildfires on individual health outcomes, and (3) the causal influence of wildfires larger than different sizes within different distances of counties on health outcomes at the county level. The analysis exploits data from National Vital Statistics System, Behavioural Risk…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis
Year: 2023
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metrics and Considerations for Evaluating How Forest Treatments Alter Wildfire Behavior and Effects
Year: 2023
The influence of forest treatments on wildfire effects is challenging to interpret. This is, in part, because the impact forest treatments have on wildfire can be slight and variable across many factors. Effectiveness of a treatment also depends on the metric considered. We present and define human–fire interaction, fire behavior, and ecological metrics of forest treatment effects on wildfire and discuss important considerations and recommendations for evaluating treatments. We demonstrate these concepts using a case study from the Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado, USA. Pre-fire forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimizing the implementation of a forest fuel break network
Year: 2023
Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires. A key question facing managers is how to scale treatments into manageable project areas that meet operational and administrative constraints, and then prioritize their implementation over time to maximize fire management outcomes. We developed and tested a spatial modeling system to optimize the implementation of a proposed 3,538 km fuel break network…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social vulnerability of the people exposed to wildfires in U.S. West Coast states
Year: 2023
Understanding of the vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfires is limited. We used an index from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the social vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfire from 2000–2021 in California, Oregon, and Washington, which accounted for 90% of exposures in the western United States. The number of people exposed to fire from 2000–2010 to 2011–2021 increased substantially, with the largest increase, nearly 250%, for people with high social vulnerability. In Oregon and Washington, a higher percentage of exposed people were highly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Multi-Objective Scheduling of Fuel Treatments to Implement a Linear Fuel Break Network
Year: 2022
We developed and applied a spatial optimization algorithm to prioritize forest and fuel management treatments within a proposed linear fuel break network on a 0.5 million ha Western US national forest. The large fuel break network, combined with the logistics of conducting forest and fuel management, requires that treatments be partitioned into a sequence of discrete projects, individually implemented over the next 10–20 years. The original plan for the network did not consider how linear segments would be packaged into projects and how projects would be prioritized for treatments over time,…
Publication Type: Journal Article