Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 209
Evaluating a simulation-based wildfire burn probability map for the conterminous US
Year: 2025
Background: Wildfire simulation models are used to derive maps of burn probability (BP) based on fuels, weather, topography and ignition locations, and BP maps are key components of wildfire risk assessments.Aims: Few studies have compared BP maps with real-world fires to evaluate their suitability for near-future risk assessment. Here, we evaluated a BP map for the conterminous US based on the large fire simulation model FSim.Methods: We compared BP with observed wildfires from 2016 to 2022 across 128 regions representing similar fire regimes (‘pyromes’). We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling the probability of bark beetle-caused tree mortality as a function of watershed-scale host species presence and basal area
Year: 2025
In recent decades, bark beetle outbreaks have caused mass tree mortality in western US forests, which has led to altered wildfire characteristics, hydrological processes, and forest carbon dynamics. Understanding spatial variability in forest susceptibility to bark beetle outbreaks in the western US could inform strategic forest management to reduce wildfire risk, manage forest carbon, and plan for altered hydrology. The susceptibility of a forest stand to mortality by bark beetles depends on the availability and characteristics of trees of the host tree species. For multiple bark beetle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Collapse and restoration of mature forest habitat in California
Year: 2025
Mature and old-growth forests provide critically important ecosystems services and wildlife habitats, but they are being lost at a rapid rate to uncharacteristic mega-disturbances. We developed a simulation system to project time-to-extinction for mature and old-growth forest habitat in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA. The simulation parameters were derived from a 1985–2022 empirical time-series of habitat for the southern Sierra Nevada fisher (Pekania pennanti), an endangered native mammal and old-forest obligate that has seen a 50 % decline in its habitat over the past…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Shaping Land Use Patterns in the Wildland-Urban Interface: The Role of State and Local Governments in Reducing Exposure to Wildfire Risks
Year: 2025
Development in the wildland-urban interface is increasing exposure to wildfire risks in the western United States. Yet, among the components of risk—hazard, vulnerability, and exposure—mitigating exposure has arguably been most difficult. In this report, we describe the set of interconnected state and local policies that affect development and risk exposure, including local land use planning and zoning, state policies governing insurance, building codes, and infrastructure spending, as well as the role of states as intermediaries between the federal government and localities. We discuss…
Publication Type: Report
Can ‘‘Fire Safe’’ Cigarettes (FSCs) Start Wildfires?
Year: 2025
Over the last 20 years, all states within the US have required all cigarettes sold to be ‘‘fire safe’’ or ‘‘fire standards compliant’’ meaning that they must pass ASTM standard E2187. Though these cigarettes are designed to self-extinguish, there have been recent studies suggesting that these ‘‘fire safe’’ cigarettes (FSCs) can still ignite mattresses and other furnishings, but there has been no guidance for fire investigators whether FSCs can ignite natural fuels, such as duff and needles, that can be the source of a wildland fire. This work sets out to investigate whether FSCs can indeed be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Ecological scenarios: Embracing ecological uncertainty in an era of global change
Year: 2025
Scenarios, or plausible characterizations of the future, can help natural resource stewards plan and act under uncertainty. Current methods for developing scenarios for climate change adaptation planning are often focused on exploring uncertainties in future climate, but new approaches are needed to better represent uncertainties in ecological responses. Scenarios that characterize how ecological changes may unfold in response to climate and describe divergent and surprising ecological outcomes can help natural resource stewards recognize signs of nascent ecological transformation and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Equity in resilience: a case study of community resilience to wildfire in southwestern Oregon, United States
Year: 2025
In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system. Marginalized communities are often most affected and least prepared for disturbances of this kind, where racism, colonialism, and structural equities prevent meaningful inclusion and equitable allocation of resources. This research centers these voices in an empirical study of the situated resilience of the Rogue River Basin, rooted in the work of community-based organizations…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate Change Contributions to US Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 Mortality Between 2006-2020
Year: 2025
RATIONALE Wildfires have increased in frequency and intensity due to climate change and now contribute to nearly half of the annual average of fine particulate matter in the US. While the effects of short-term wildfire-PM2.5 exposure on respiratory diseases are well-described, the impact of climate change on longer duration wildfire-PM2.5 mortality is unknown. Our aim was to determine the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to wildfire smoke PM2.5 mortality on a county-level across the conterminous US between 2006-2020. METHODS We use an attribution model to compare observed wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A fast spectral recovery does not necessarily indicate post-fire forest recovery
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate change has increased wildfire activity in the western USA and limited the capacity for forests to recover post-fire, especially in areas burned at high severity. Land managers urgently need a better understanding of the spatiotemporal variability in natural post-fire forest recovery to plan and implement active recovery projects. In burned areas, post-fire “spectral recovery”, determined by examining the trajectory of multispectral indices (e.g., normalized burn ratio) over time, generally corresponds with recovery of multiple post-fire vegetation types, including trees and…
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
Probabilistic Forecasting of Lightning Strikes over the Continental USA and Alaska: Model Development and Verification
Year: 2024
Lightning is responsible for the most area annually burned by wildfires in the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere. Hence, predicting the occurrence of wildfires requires reliable forecasting of the chance of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes during storms. Here, we describe the development and verification of a probabilistic lightning-strike algorithm running on a uniform 20 km grid over the continental USA and Alaska. This is the first and only high-resolution lightning forecasting model for North America derived from 29-year-long data records. The algorithm consists of a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Blending Indigenous and western science: Quantifying cultural burning impacts in Karuk Aboriginal Territory
Year: 2024
The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate. While there is increasing recognition of Indigenous fire stewardship among western scientists and managers, the extent and purpose of cultural burning is generally absent from the landscape–fire modeling literature and our understanding of ecosystem processes and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation
Year: 2024
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that is organized around ecological conditions, capacity to act, and motivation to use fire and can integrate and expand intentional fire use as a tool. This result emerges from more considered collaboration and communication of values and needs to address…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evidence of increasing wildfire damage with decreasing property price in Southern California fires
Year: 2024
Across the Western United States, human development into the wildland urban interface (WUI) is contributing to increasing wildfire damage. Given that natural disasters often cause greater harm within socio-economically vulnerable groups, research is needed to explore the potential for disproportionate impacts associated with wildfire. Using Zillow Transaction and Assessment Database (ZTRAX), hereafter “Zillow”, real estate data, we explored whether lower-priced structures were more likely to be damaged during the most destructive, recent wildfires in Southern California. Within fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human driven climate change increased the likelihood of the 2023 record area burned in Canada
Year: 2024
In 2023, wildfires burned 15 million hectares in Canada, more than doubling the previous record. These wildfires caused a record number of evacuations, unprecedented air quality impacts across Canada and the northeastern United States, and substantial strain on fire management resources. Using climate models, we show that human-induced climate change significantly increased the likelihood of area burned at least as large as in 2023 across most of Canada, with more than two-fold increases in the east and southwest. The long fire season was more than five times as likely and the large areas…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Resource objective wildfire leveraged to restore old growth forest structure while stabilizing carbon stocks in the southwestern United States
Year: 2024
Wildfire futures and aboveground carbon (C) dynamics associated with forest restoration programs that integrate resource objective wildfire as part of a larger treatment strategy are not well understood. Using simulation modeling, we examined alternative forest and fuel management strategies on a 237,218-ha study area within a 778,000-ha landscape that is a high priority target for federal restoration programs. We simulated two wildfire management scenarios combined with three levels of conventional forest restoration treatments over 64 years using a detailed landscape disturbance and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using focus groups for knowledge sharing: Tracking emerging pandemic impacts on USFS wildland fire operations
Year: 2024
In early 2020 the US Forest Service (USFS) recognized the need to gather real-time information from its wildland fire management personnel about their challenges and adaptations during the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. The USFS conducted 194 virtual focus groups to address these concerns, over 32 weeks from March 2020 to October 2020. This management effort provided an opportunity for an innovative practice-based research study. Here, we outline a novel methodological approach (weekly, iterative focus groups, with two-way communication between USFS staff and leadership), which culminated in a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social Inequity and Wildfire Response: Identifying Gaps and Interventions in Ventura County, California
Year: 2024
As climate change increases the frequency and severity of wildfires across the Western U.S., there is an urgent need for improved wildfire preparedness and responses. Socially marginalized communities are particularly vulnerable to wildfire effects because they disproportionately lack access to the resources necessary to prepare for and recover from wildfire and are frequently underrepresented in the wildfire planning process. As an exemplar of how to understand and improve preparedness in such communities, this research identified communities in Ventura County facing heightened…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predicting daily firefighting personnel deployment trends in the western United States
Year: 2024
Projected increases in wildfire frequency, size, and severity may further stress already scarce firefighting resources in the western United States that are in high demand. Machine learning is a promising field with the ability to model firefighting resource usage without compromising dataset size or complexity. In this study, the Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) model was used with historical (2012-2020) wildfire data to train three models that calculate predicted daily counts of 1) total assigned personnel (total personnel), 2) assigned personnel that are at the fire (ground personnel), and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial and temporal analysis of vulnerability disparity of minorities to wildfires in California
Year: 2024
Wildfires typically have devastating impacts on communities, both in urban and rural areas, resulting in property loss, psychological distress, physical injuries, and loss of life. A notable gap in the literature is the spatial and temporal disproportionate impact of wildfires on underrepresented communities. This lack of attention is concerning, as these underrepresented populations are likely to be more vulnerable to the devastating consequences of wildfire disasters, exacerbating pre-existing social, economic, and environmental disparities. This study aims to address this gap by conducting…
Publication Type: Journal Article