Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 111
Rare and highly destructive wildfires drive human migration in the U.S.
Year: 2024
The scale of wildfire impacts to the built environment is growing and will likely continue under rising average global temperatures. We investigate whether and at what destruction threshold wildfires have influenced human mobility patterns by examining the migration effects of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020. We find that only the most extreme wildfires (258+ structures destroyed) influenced migration patterns. In contrast, the majority of wildfires examined were less destructive and did not cause significant changes to out- or in-migration. These…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bridging scales for landscape-level wildfire adaptation: A case study of the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition
Year: 2024
Federal-level strategies or guidance for addressing wildfire risk encourage adaptation activities that span progressively larger scales, often focusing on landscape-level action that necessitates coordination between decision-makers and socially diverse communities. Collaborative organizations are increasingly explored as one approach for coordinating local efforts that address wildfire risk and adaptation, offering a platform for scaling and adjusting federal and state guidance that align with the needs of local landscapes. We conducted semi-structured interviews with members and supporters…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing fire regimes and nuanced impacts on a critically imperiled species
Year: 2024
Wildfire activity throughout western North America is increasing which can have important consequences for species persistence. Native species have evolved disturbance-adapted traits that confer resilience to natural disturbance provided disturbances operate within their historical range of variability. This resilience can erode as disturbance regimes change and begin operating outside this range. We assessed wildfire impacts during 1987–2018 on the northern spotted owl, an imperiled species with complex relationships with late and early seral forest in the Pacific Northwest, USA. We analyzed…
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
Wildfire narratives: Identifying and characterizing multiple understandings of western wildfire challenges
Year: 2024
Western wildfires present a complex sustainability challenge characterized by more severe fires and escalating risks. To mitigate western wildfire risks, collaborative management practices need to transform the processes involved in knowledge production, seizing the opportunities and overcoming obstacles associated with actors’ multiple understandings. Knowledge co-production represents an increasingly referenced process for bringing together diverse actors, including scientists from different disciplines and non-scientists, to construct place-based and action-oriented knowledge. While…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire history in northern Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forests across a distinct gradient in productivity
Year: 2024
BackgroundUnderstanding the role of fire in forested landscapes is fundamental to fire reintroduction efforts, yet few studies have examined how fire dynamics vary in response to interactions between local conditions, such as soil productivity, and more broadscale changes in climate. In this study, we examined historical fire frequency, seasonality, and spatial patterning in mixed conifer forests across a distinct gradient of soil productivity in the northern Sierra Nevada. We cross-dated 46 different wood samples containing 377 fire scars from 6 paired sites, located on and off of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-contact Indigenous fire stewardship: a research framework and application to a Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest
Year: 2024
Fire is a key disturbance process that shapes the structure and function of montane temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Recent research is revealing more frequent historical fire activity in the western central Cascades than expected by conventional theory. Indigenous peoples have lived in the PNW for millennia. However, Indigenous people's roles in shaping vegetation mosaics in montane temperate forests of the PNW has been overlooked, despite archaeological evidence of long-term, continuous human use of these landscapes. In this paper, we present a generalizable research…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cooperative Community Wildfire Response: Pathways to First Nations’ leadership and partnership in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2024
With the growing scale of wildfires, many First Nations are demanding a stronger role in wildfire response. Disproportionate impacts on Indigenous communities (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) in Canada are motivating these demands: although approximately 5% of the population identifies as Indigenous, about 42% of wildfire evacuation events occur communities that are more than half Indigenous. In what is now known as British Columbia, Canada, new pathways for cooperative wildfire response between First Nations and provincial agencies are emerging. Drawing from semi-structured…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring support and opposition to regulatory approaches for wildfire risk management: requirements, voluntary actions, and tailored local action
Year: 2024
Formal requirements of wildfire mitigation on private properties are increasingly being considered as one avenue for “scaling up” wildfire management and voluntary mitigation actions to landscape scales. Likewise, enduring segments of wildfire research suggest that residents’ perceptions about potential wildfire risk sources in their landscape, including ignition sources, are critical considerations related to support for mitigation efforts such as formal requirements or cross-boundary fuel reduction initiatives. The research presented in this article utilized mixed-method, residential…
Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical pyrodiversity in Douglas-fir forests of the southern Cascades of Oregon, USA
Year: 2024
Our understanding of forest dynamics and successional pathways in coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var menziesii) forests with relatively frequent mixed-severity fires is limited by a lack of annually precise dendroecological reconstructions that combine records of historical fires and tree establishment. The processes by which old-forest heterogeneity developed under historical fire regimes with recurrent low- and moderate-severity fires has not been well studied at fine temporal scales and across spatial scales. We developed crossdated multi-century records of fire and…
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
Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity
Year: 2024
Pyrodiversity (temporally and spatially diverse fire histories) is thought to promote biodiversity by increasing environmental heterogeneity and replicating Indigenous fire regimes, yet studies of pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships from areas under active Indigenous fire stewardship are rare. Here, we explored whether Indigenous pyrodiversity promoted plant richness and diversity in an arid ecosystem from north-western Australia. We selected landscapes that ranged from highly pyrodiverse and under active Indigenous burning to more coarse-scale and less diverse mosaics under lightning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High-severity burned area and proportion exceed historic conditions in Sierra Nevada, California, and adjacent ranges
Year: 2023
Although fire is a fundamental ecological process in western North American forests, climate warming and accumulating forest fuels due to fire suppression have led to wildfires that burn at high severity across larger fractions of their footprint than were historically typical. These trends have spiked upwards in recent years and are particularly pronounced in the Sierra Nevada–Southern Cascades ecoregion of California, USA, and neighboring states. We assessed annual area burned (AAB) and percentage of area burned at high and low-to-moderate severity for seven major forest types in this…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate influences on future fire severity: a synthesis of climate-fire interactions and impacts on fire regimes, high-severity fire, and forests in the western United States
Year: 2023
Background
Increases in fire activity and changes in fire regimes have been documented in recent decades across the western United States. Climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires across the western United States (US). Warming temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are altering western landscapes and making them more susceptible to high-severity fire. Increases in large patches of high-severity fire can result in significant impacts to landscape processes and ecosystem function…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Does large area burned mean a bad fire year? Comparing contemporary wildfire years to historical fire regimes informs the restoration task in fire-dependent forests
Year: 2023
Wildfires and fire seasons are commonly rated largely on the simple metric of area burned (more hectares: bad). A seemingly paradoxical narrative frames large fire seasons as a symptom of a forest health problem (too much fire), while simultaneously stating that fire-dependent forests lack sufficient fire to maintain system resilience (too little fire). One key to resolving this paradox is placing contemporary fire years in the context of historical fire regimes, considering not only total fire area but also burn severity distributions. Historical regimes can also inform forest restoration…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changes in wildfire occurrence and risk to homes from 1990 through 2019 in the Southern Rocky Mountains, USA
Year: 2023
Wildfires and housing development have increased since the 1990s, presenting unique challenges for wildfire management. However, it is unclear how the relative influences of housing growth and changing wildfire occurrence have altered risk to homes, or the potential for wildfire to threaten homes. We used a random forests model to predict burn probability in relation to weather variables at 1-km resolution and monthly intervals from 1990 through 2019 in the Southern Rocky Mountains ecoregion. We quantified risk by combining the predicted burn probabilities with decadal housing density. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disaster preparedness and community helping behaviour in the wake of the 2020 Oregon wildfires
Year: 2023
Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity owing to climate change. Individual-level behavioural responses—notably, disaster preparedness and community helping actions (such as donating and volunteering)—supplement government efforts to respond to such phenomena, but rarely have they been explored together. Using data from a survey administered soon after the 2020 Oregon wildfires, this paper compares a range of socio-demographic, experiential, attitudinal, and communication-related factors associated with these two individual-level behavioural responses. Findings…
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
Abrupt, climate-induced increase in wildfires in British Columbia since the mid-2000s
Year: 2023
In the province of British Columbia, Canada, four of the most severe wildfire seasons of the last century occurred in the past 7 years: 2017, 2018, 2021, and 2023. To investigate trends in wildfire activity and fire-conducive climate, we conducted an analysis of mapped wildfire perimeters and annual climate data for the period of 1919–2021. Results show that after a century-long decline, fire activity increased from 2005 onwards, coinciding with a sharp reversal in the wetting trend of the 20th century. Even as precipitation levels remain high, moisture deficits have increased due to rapid…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire-driven animal evolution in the Pyrocene
Year: 2023
Fire regimes are a major agent of evolution in terrestrial animals. Changing fire regimes and the capacity for rapid evolution in wild animal populations suggests the potential for rapid, fire-driven adaptive animal evolution in the Pyrocene. Fire drives multiple modes of evolutionary change, including stabilizing, directional, disruptive, and fluctuating selection, and can strongly influence gene flow and genetic drift. Ongoing and future research in fire-driven animal evolution will benefit from further development of generalizable hypotheses, studies conducted in highly responsive taxa,…
Publication Type: Journal Article