Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 219
Climate and wildfire adaptation of inland Northwest US forests
Year: 2021
After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re-evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington. The case for re- evaluation is clearest where small- to large-sized, immature, fast-growing, fire-intolerant trees have filled in forests after both a long period of fire exclusion and the harvest of large, old trees. This infilling…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Perceptions of wildland fire smoke
Year: 2021
With exposure to wildland fire smoke projected to further increase (Barbero et al. 2015) there is a clear need for efforts to better mitigate or adapt to smoke impacts in high-risk areas. Such efforts relyon an understanding of how people perceive, plan for, and respond to smoke. This synthesis compiles published scholarly literature on how individuals perceive wildland fire smoke to offer an overview of current knowledge on wildland fire smoke perceptions.It is intended to serve as a documentation of the scope, parameters, and gaps of research to date in this field.
Publication Type: Report
Communicating with the public about wildland fire: A resource for practitioners to plan engagement strategies
Year: 2021
This infographic summarizes recommendations from a review of 32 research studies about communicating with the public about wildland fire and smoke
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Mixed Methods Literature Review and Framework for Decision Factors That May Influence the Utilization of Managed Wildfire on Federal Lands, USA
Year: 2021
There is increasing discussion in the academic and agency literature, as well as popular media, about the need to address the existing deficit of beneficial fire on landscapes. One approach allowable under United States federal wildland fire policy that could help address this condition is by deliberately managing wildfire with a strategy other than full suppression (hereafter referred to as ‘managed wildfire’). To improve the understanding of the managed fire decision-making process, we conducted a mixed methods review of the existing literature. This review spanned 1976 to 2013 and used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
U.S. Geological Survey Wildland Fire Science Strategic Plan, 2021-26
Year: 2021
The USGS Wildland Fire Science Strategic Plan (hereafter, Strategic Plan) was developed by USGS fire scientists and executive leadership, and was informed by discussions with external stakeholders. The Strategic Plan is aligned with the needs of the fire science stakeholder community—fire, land, natural resource, and emergency managers from Federal, State, Tribal, and community organizations and members of the broad scientific community. The Strategic Plan also defines critical, core fire science capabilities for understanding fire-related and fire-responsive earth system processes and…
Publication Type: Report
Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: ten common questions
Year: 2021
We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
An ecological perspective on living with fire in ponderosa pine forests of Oregon and Washington: Resistance, gone but not forgotten
Year: 2021
Wildland fires (WLF) have become more frequent, larger, and severe with greater impacts to society and ecosys- tems and dramatic increases in firefighting costs. Forests throughout the range of ponderosa pine in Oregon and Washington are jeopardized by the interaction of anomalously dense forest structure, a warming and dry- ing climate, and an expanding human population. These forests evolved with frequent interacting disturbances including low-severity surface fires, droughts, and biological disturbance agents (BDAs). Chronic low-severity disturbances were, and still are, critical to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Keepers of the Flame: Supporting the Revitalization of Indigenous Cultural Burning
Year: 2021
The revitalization of cultural burning is a priority for many Native American tribes and for agencies and organizations that recognize the cultural and ecological importance of this practice. Traditional fire practitioners are working to resist the impact of settler colonialism and reestablish cultural burning to promote traditional foods and materials, exercise their sovereignty in land management, and strengthen their communities’ cultural, physical and emotional wellbeing. Despite broad support for cultural burning, the needs of practitioners are often poorly understood by non-Native…
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
Bridging the research-management gap: landscape science in practice on public lands in the western United States
Year: 2020
Landscape science relies on foundational concepts of landscape ecology and seeks to understand the physical, biological, and human components of ecosystems to support land management decision-making. Incorporating landscape science into land management decisions, however, remains challenging. Many lands in the western United States are federally owned and managed for multiple uses, including recreation, conservation, and energy development. We argue for stronger integration of landscape science into the management of these public lands. We open by outlining the relevance of landscape science…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Weather, Risk, and Resource Orders on Large Wildland Fires in the Western US
Year: 2020
Our results suggest that weather is a primary driver of resource orders over the course of extended attack efforts on large fires. Incident Management Teams (IMTs) synthesize information about weather, fuels, and order resources based on expected fire growth rather than simply reacting to observed fire growth. Background and Objectives: Weather conditions are a well-known determinant of fire behavior and are likely to become more erratic under climate change. Yet, there is little empirical evidence demonstrating how IMTs respond to observed or expected weather conditions. An understanding of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire decision support tools: an exploratory study of use in the United States
Year: 2020
In the United States, many decision support tools exist to provide fire managers with weather and fire behaviour information to inform and facilitate risk-based decision-making. Relatively little is known about how managers use these tools in the field and when and how they may serve to influence decisions. To address this gap, we conducted exploratory interviews with 27 wildfire management and fire weather professionals across the United States. Results reveal that barriers to the use of decision support tools are structural and social. Specifically, fire weather and behaviour models may not…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fire science: the case for a refined research agenda
Year: 2020
The realm of wildland fire science encompasses both wild and prescribed fires. Most of the research in the broader field has focused on wildfires, however, despite the prevalence of prescribed fires and demonstrated need for science to guide its application. We argue that prescribed fire science requires a fundamentally different approach to connecting related disciplines of physical, natural, and social sciences. We also posit that research aimed at questions relevant to prescribed fire will improve overall wildland fire science and stimulate the development of useful knowledge about managed…
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
Crowded and Thirsty: Fire exclusion leads to greater drought sensitivity in mixed-conifer forests
Year: 2020
Wildfires were a frequent source of disturbance in forests of the Western United States prior to Euro-American settlement. Following a series of catastrophic wildfires in the Northern Rockies in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a broad wildfire suppression policy that has resulted in forests thick with small trees. These crowded trees compete for nutrients and water and experience increased drought stress in summer.In recent decades, many trees have died following drought, bark beetle outbreaks, and severe wildfire. A link between this mortality and increasing susceptibility to drought…
Publication Type: Report
Pre-season fire management planning: the use of Potential Operational Delineations to prepare for wildland fire events
Year: 2020
US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives. PODs are a collaborative planning approach based on spatial analytics to identify potential wildfire control lines and assess the desirability of fire before ignition. They offer the opportunity to apply risk management principles with partners before the compressed timeframe of incident response. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors Associated with Structure Loss in the 2013–2018 California Wildfires
Year: 2019
Tens of thousands of structures and hundreds of human lives have been lost in recent fire events throughout California. Given the potential for these types of wildfires to continue, the need to understand why and how structures are being destroyed has taken on a new level of urgency. We compiled and analyzed an extensive dataset of building inspectors’ reports documenting homeowner mitigation practices for more than 40,000 wildfire-exposed structures from 2013–2018. Comparing homes that survived fires to homes that were destroyed, we investigated the role of defensible space distance,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland Fire Science Needs in Oregon and Washington: Local and regional research availability, applications, and gaps
Year: 2019
The Northwest Fire Science Consortium (Consortium) works to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science by connecting users in the Pacific Northwest with the most useful resources available. These efforts require an ongoing understanding of how users access wildland fire science, the challenges and opportunities that they experience in using different types of research, and topics where more information is needed. Previous research, including a prior assessment by the Consortium in 2011,1 has highlighted the importance of local or regionally-relevant…
Publication Type: Report
Forest Service fire management and the elusiveness of change
Year: 2019
There is broad recognition that fire management in the United States must fundamentally change and depart from practices that have led to an over-emphasis on suppression and limited the presence of fire in forested ecosystems. In this paper, we look at competing problem definitions in US Forest Service policy for fire management, the presence of goal ambiguity, and how these factors can explain why changes in fire management have been elusive, despite policy change. We consider US Forest Service fire policies, performance incentives, and decision-making processes for two sides of the agency:…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical patterns of fire severity and forest structure and composition in a landscape structured by frequent large fires: Pumice Plateau ecoregion, Oregon, USA
Year: 2019
Context Lack of quantitative observations of extent, frequency, and severity of large historical fires constrains awareness of departure of contemporary conditions from those that demonstrated resistance and resilience to frequent fire and recurring drought. Objectives Compare historical and contemporary fire and forest conditions for a dry forest landscape with few barriers to fire spread. Methods Quantify differences in (1) historical (1700–1918) and contemporary (1985–2015) fire extent, fire rotation, and stand-replacing fire and (2) historical (1914–1924) and contemporary (2012) forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article