Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 111
Building water resilience in the face of cascading wildfire risks
Year: 2023
Severe wildfire is altering the natural and the built environment and posing risks to environmental and societal health and well-being, including cascading impacts to water systems and built water infrastructure. Research on wildfire-resilient water systems is growing but not keeping pace with the scale and severity of wildfire impacts, despite their intensifying threat. In this study, we evaluate the state of knowledge regarding wildfire-related hazards to water systems. We propose a holistic framework to assess interactions and feedback loops between water quality, quantity, and…
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
Use of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) for full suppression and managed fires within the Southwestern Region of the US Forest Service
Year: 2023
Background: United States federal wildland fire policy requires the use of formal decision support systems (DSS) for fire incidents that last for an extended time. However, the ways that wildfire managers use DSSs in decisions regarding fire management remain understudied, including how users engage with or utilise them to make strategic decisions. Aims: Researchers sought to understand how users engage with the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS), their view of its utilities and challenges, and their perspectives about WFDSS training. Methods: We present the results of thematic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Big Lie: discursive risk analysis and wildland firefighter safety in the Western United States
Year: 2023
While increased length and intensity of wildfire seasons in many places have led to more concern about wildland firefighter safety, we believe ethnography has been underutilized as a method within this domain. In response, we begin building a shared idiom for ethnographic engagement with wildland firefighter safety and similar occupations. We draw on ethnographic approaches to late industrialism to develop a method called discursive risk analysis (DRA) as an initial stage in a broader collaborative and generative research practice. By collaborative, we mean cooperation among stakeholder,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire severity infuences large wood and stream ecosystem responses in western Oregon watersheds
Year: 2023
Background. Wildfre is a landscape disturbance important for stream ecosystems and the recruitment of large wood (LW; LW describes wood in streams) into streams, with post-fre management also playing a role. We used a stratifed random sample of 4th-order watersheds that represent a range of pre-fre stand age and fre severity from unburned to entirely burned watersheds to 1) determine whether watershed stand age (pre-fre) or fre severity afected riparianoverstory survival, riparian coarse wood (CW; CW describes wood in riparian areas), LW, or in-stream physical, chemical, and biological…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Creating Fire-Adapted Communities Through Recovery: Case Studies from the United States and Australia
Year: 2023
Wildfires can be devastating for social and ecological systems, but the recovery period after wildfire presents opportunities to reduce future risk through adaptation. We use a collective case study approach to systematically compare social and ecological recovery following four major fire events in Australia and the United States: the 1998 wildfires in northeastern Florida; the 2003 Cedar fire in southern California; the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, southeastern Australia; and the 2011 Bastrop fires in Texas. Fires spurred similar policy changes, with an emphasis on education,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation in watersheds in the western United States
Year: 2023
Scaling up climate-adaptation in wildfire-prone watersheds requires innovative partnerships and funding. Water utilities are one stakeholder group that could play a role in these efforts. The overarching purpose of this study was to understand water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation efforts in the western United States. We conducted an online survey of water utilities in nine states and received 173 useable responses. While most (68%) respondents were concerned or very concerned about future wildfire events and the impact of wildfire on their operations, only 39% perceived their…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Measuring the long-term costs of uncharacteristic wildfire: a case study of the 2010 Schultz Fire in Northern Arizona
Year: 2023
Background
Wildfires often have long-lasting costs that are difficult to document and are rarely captured in full.
Aims
We provide an example for measuring the full costs of a single wildfire over time, using a case study from the 2010 Schultz Fire near Flagstaff, Arizona, to enhance our understanding of the long-term costs of uncharacteristic wildfire.
Methods
We conducted a partial remeasurement of a 2013 study on the costs of the Schultz Fire by updating government and utility expenditures, conducting a survey of affected homeowners, estimating costs to ecosystem services and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Wildland Firefighters’ Assessments of Structure Defensibility
Year: 2023
In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effectiveness of fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs in wildland firefighting: a cluster randomised control trial
Year: 2022
Critical to effective fire management is the protection and preparedness of highly trained wildland firefighters who routinely face extreme physical and psychological demands. To date, there is limited scientific evidence of psychosocial education intervention effectiveness in this context. The objective of the current study is to utilise a cluster randomised control trial study design to evaluate fitness training and psychosocial education intervention programs across a wildland fire season. Wildland firefighters (n = 230) were randomly assigned by their work location to one of four…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Lifestyle and environmental factors may induce airway and systemic inflammation in firefighters
Year: 2022
Health status depends on multiple genetic and non-genetic factors. Nonheritable factors (such as lifestyle and environmental factors) have stronger impact on immune responses than genetic factors. Firefighters work is associated with exposure to air pollution and heat stress, as well as: extreme physical effort, mental stress, or a changed circadian rhythm, among others. All these factors can contribute to both, short-term and long-term impairment of the physical and mental health of firefighters. Increased levels of some inflammatory markers, such as pro-inflammatory cytokines or C-reactive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Growing impact of wildfire on western US water supply
Year: 2022
Streamflow often increases after fire, but the persistence of this effect and its importance to present and future regional water resources are unclear. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps for the western United States (WUS), where annual forest fire area increased by more than 1,100% during 1984 to 2020. Among 72 forested basins across the WUS that burned between 1984 and 2019, the multibasin mean streamflow was significantly elevated by 0.19 SDs (P < 0.01) for an average of 6 water years postfire, compared to the range of results expected from climate alone. Sig- nificance is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Minimize the bad days: Wildland fire response and suppression success
Year: 2022
• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating. • By mobilizing a timely and safe initial response, early detection technologies, strategic networks of fuel breaks, and Rangeland Fire Protection Associations help “minimize the bad days” on the fireline and improve suppression…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The US Forest Service Life First safety initiative: exploring unnecessary exposure to risk
Year: 2022
In 2016, the US Forest Service initiated small-group safety discussions among members of its wildland firefighting organisation. Known as the Life First National Engagement Sessions, the discussions presented an opportunity for wildland firefighters to address systemic and cultural dysfunctions in the wildland fire system. The Life First initiative included a post-engagement survey in which more than 2600 Forest Service employees provided open-ended feedback. In that qualitative subset of results, survey respondents described four main situations in which wildland firefighters commonly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring relationships between perceived suppression capabilities and resident performance of wildfire mitigations
Year: 2022
Increased wildfire activity has led to renewed interest in enhancing local capacity to reduce wildfire risk in residential areas. Local fire departments (LFDs) are often the first responders to rural wildfires. However, LFDs may also struggle to address service demands in the growing wildland urban interface, including increasing numbers of wildfire incidents and changes in area socio-demographics (e.g., aging populations) or culture (e.g., decreasing volunteerism, new residents). We used a mixed-mode survey (n = 770) to explore rural perceptions of various fire service organizations (FSOs),…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Priorities and Effectiveness in Wildfire Management: Evidence from Fire Spread in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Costs of fighting wildfires have increased substantially over the past several decades. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of wildfire suppression or how wildfire incident managers prioritize resources threatened within a wildfire incident. We investigate the determinants of wildfire suppression effort using a novel empirical strategy comparing over 1,400 historical fire perimeters to the spatial distribution of assets at risk. We find that fires are more likely to stop spreading as they approach homes, particularly when homes are of greater value. This effect persists…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme fire spread events and area burned under recent and future climate in the western USA
Year: 2022
Aim: Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single-day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities. Our objectives were to gain new insight into the relationships between extreme single-day fire spread events, annual area burned, and fire season climate and to predict changes under future warming. Location: Fire-prone regions of the western USA. Time period: 2002–2020; a future +2°C scenario. Methods: We used a satellite-derived dataset of daily fire spread events and gridded…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Roads and Operational Wildfire Response Planning
Year: 2021
Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations. Of interesthere is how road networks directly support fire control operations, and how managers incorporatethat information into pre-season assessment and planning. In this communication we briefly reviewand illustrate how forest roads relate to recent advances in operationally focused wildfire decisionsupport. We focus on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Potential COVID-19 Outbreak in Fire Camp: Modeling Scenarios and Interventions
Year: 2020
The global COVID-19 pandemic will pose unique challenges to the management of wildlandfire in 2020. Fire camps may provide an ideal setting for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virusthat causes COVID-19. However, intervention strategies can help minimize disease spread andreduce the risk to the firefighting community. We developed a COVID-19 epidemic model tohighlight the risks posed by the disease during wildland fire incidents. Our model accounts forthe transient nature of the population on a wildland fire incident, which poses unique risks to themanagement of communicable diseases in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Classification of US Wildland Firefighter Entrapments Based on Coincident Fuels, Weather, and Topography
Year: 2019
Previous attempts to identify the environmental factors associated with firefighter entrapments in the United States have suggested that there are several common denominators. Despite the widespread acceptance of the assumed commonalities, few studies have quantified how often entrapments actually meet these criteria. An analysis of the environmental conditions at the times and locations of 166 firefighter entrapments involving 1202 people and 117 fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2017 in the conterminous United States revealed some surprising results. Contrary to general assumptions…
Publication Type: Journal Article