Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 261
Untrammeling the wilderness: restoring natural conditions through the return of human-ignited fire
Year: 2024
Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes. Within many designated wilderness areas, this intentional exclusion of fire has clearly altered ecological processes and thus constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Through a framework that recognizes four orders of trammeling, we demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire…
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
Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics
Year: 2024
Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls. This delineation revealed that rapidly increasing forest fire emissions in extratropical pyromes, linked to climate change, offset declining emissions in tropical pyromes during 2001 to 2023. Annual emissions tripled in one extratropical pyrome due to…
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
Garden design can reduce wildfire risk and drive more sustainable co-existence with wildfire
Year: 2024
Destructive wildfire disasters are escalating globally, challenging existing fire management paradigms. The establishment of defensible space around homes in wildland and rural urban interfaces can help to reduce the risk of house loss and provide a safe area for residents and firefighters to defend the property from wildfire. Although defensible space is a well-established concept in fire management, it has received surprisingly limited scientific discussion. Here we reviewed guidelines on the creation of defensible space from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Western larch regeneration more sensitive to wildfire-related factors than seasonal climate variability
Year: 2024
To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the northwestern US. We destructively sampled 1651 seedlings from 57 sites across 32 fires that burned at moderate or high severity between 2000 and 2015; sites were within 100 m of reproductively mature western larch. Using dendrochronological methods, we estimated germination years of seedlings to calculate annual recruitment rates. We used boosted…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Wildfire Progression Simulation and Risk-Rating Methodology for Power Grid Infrastructure
Year: 2024
As the frequency and intensity of power line-induced wildfires increase due to climate-, human- , and infrastructure-related risk drivers, maintaining power system resilience and reducing environmental impacts become increasingly crucial. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology to assess the susceptibility, vulnerability, and risk of power line-induced wildfires for lines and nodes in an electric grid. The methodology integrates a well-established wildfire spread simulator into power flow analysis through a set of analytical steps. The proposed approach is applied to a case study…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Informing proactive wildfire management that benefits vulnerable communities and ecological values
Year: 2024
- In response to mounting wildfire risks, land managers across the country will need to dramatically increase proactive wildfire management (e.g. fuel and forest health treatments). While human communities vary widely in their vulnerability to the impacts of fire, these discrepancies have rarely informed prioritizations for wildfire mitigation treatments. The ecological values and ecosystem services provided by forests have also typically been secondary considerations.
- To identify locations across the conterminous US where proactive wildfire management is likely to be effective…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Efficacy of Red Flag Warnings in Mitigating Human-Caused Wildfires across the Western United States
Year: 2024
Red flag warnings (RFWs) are issued by the U.S. National Weather Service to alert fire and emergency response agencies of weather conditions that are conducive to extreme wildfire growth. Distinct from most weather warnings that aim to reduce exposure to anticipated hazards, RFWs may also mitigate hazards by reducing the occurrence of new ignitions. We examined the efficacy of RFWs as a means of limiting human-caused wildfire ignitions. From 2006 to 2020, approximately 8% of wildfires across the western United States and 19% of large wildfires (≥40 ha) occurred on days with RFWs. Although the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping the distance between fire hazard and disaster for communities in Canadian forests.
Year: 2024
Communities interspersed throughout the Canadian wildland are threatened by fires that have become bigger and more frequent in some parts of the country in recent decades. Identifying the fireshed (source area) and pathways from which wildland fire may ignite and spread from the landscape to a community is crucial for risk-reduction strategy and planning. We used outputs from a fire simulation model, including fire polygons and rate of spread, to map firesheds, fire pathways and corridors and spread distances for 1980 communities in the forested areas of Canada. We found fireshed sizes are…
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
Visibility-informed mapping of potential firefighter lookout locations using maximum entropy modelling
Year: 2024
BackgroundSituational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.AimsTo use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.MethodsLidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evacuation decisions of tourists in wildfire scenarios
Year: 2024
This paper investigates the factors affecting evacuation behaviour of tourists in wildfire scenarios by conducting a scoping review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis approach - here using only its extension for scoping reviews. A total of 524 scientific papers were identified in the Web of Science and Scopus and 23 studies were fully reviewed. Key variables affecting the evacuation behaviour of tourists included property attachment, past experience and preparedness, safety culture, risk perception, individual and group socio-demographics, interaction…
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
Comparing ground-based lightning detection networks near wildfire points-of-origin
Year: 2024
Lightning detection and attribution to wildfire ignitions is a critical component of fire management worldwide to both reduce hazards of wildfire to values-at-risk and to enhance the potential for wildland fire to provide resource benefits in fire-adapted ecosystems. We compared two operational ground-based lightning detection networks used by fire managers to identify cloud-to-ground strokes within operationally-relevant distances (1.6 km) of the origins of 4408 western United States lightning-ignited wildfires spanning May–September 2020. Applying two sets of constraints–varying…
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
Biogeographic patterns of daily wildfire spread and extremes across North America
Year: 2024
Introduction: Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme single-day fire spread events, with major ecological and social implications. In contrast with well-documented spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire ignitions and perimeters, daily progression remains poorly understood across continental spatial scales, particularly for extreme single-day events (“blow ups”). Here, we characterize daily wildfire spread across North America, including occurrence of extreme single-day events, duration and seasonality of fire and extremes, and ecoregional climatic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network
Year: 2024
We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring the use of satellite Earth observation active wildland fire hotspot data via open access web platforms
Year: 2024
Globally, managing wildland fire is increasing in complexity. Satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, specifically active fire ‘hotspot’ data, is often used to inform wildland fire management. This study explores hotspot data usage via web traffic data (‘user counts’) for the FIRMS, GWIS and EFFIS web portals between September 2019 and April 2023. Global active fire data use is characterized by multi-month periods of relatively low, stable user counts, interspersed with periodic spikes (4.1x median monthly activity) of activity broadly aligned with the North American / European fire season (…
Publication Type: Journal Article