Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 199
Drivers and Impacts of the Record-Breaking 2023 Wildfire Season in Canada
Year: 2024
The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity, spanning from mid-April to late October and across much of the forested regions of Canada. Here, we summarize the main causes and impacts of this exceptional season. The record-breaking total area burned (~15 Mha)can be attributed to several environmental factors that converged early in the season: early snowmelt, multi annual drought conditions in western Canada, and the rapid transition to drought in eastern Canada. Anthropogenic climate change enabled sustained extreme fire weather conditions, as the meanMay–…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Demand for Information for Wildland Fire Management
Year: 2024
Significant resources have been devoted to increasing the supply of data and information products for wildland fire management. There has been comparatively less emphasis on understanding the demand for these products. There are large differences in the number of information sources that fire managers use in decision making. We developed a value-of-information model for wildland fire managers to formulate hypotheses about what factors drive these differences. Data from a comprehensive internet survey targeting a well-defined population of the Southwest wildland fire managers are used to test…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Strategic fire zones are essential to wildfire risk reduction in the Western United States
Year: 2024
BackgroundOver the last four decades, wildfires in forests of the continental western United States have significantly increased in both size and severity after more than a century of fire suppression and exclusion. Many of these forests historically experienced frequent fire and were fuel limited. To date, fuel reduction treatments have been small and too widely dispersed to have impacted this trend. Currently new land management plans are being developed on most of the 154 National Forests that will guide and support on the ground management practices for the next 15–20 years.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring spatial heterogeneity in synergistic effects of compound climate hazards: Extreme heat and wildfire smoke on cardiorespiratory hospitalizations in California
Year: 2024
Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are increasingly co-occurring in the context of climate change, especially in California. Extreme heat and wildfire smoke may have synergistic effects on population health that vary over space. We leveraged high-resolution satellite and monitoring data to quantify spatially varying compound exposures to extreme heat and wildfire smoke in California (2006–2019) at ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) level. We found synergistic effects between extreme heat and wildfire smoke on daily cardiorespiratory hospitalizations at the state level. We also found spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
External drivers of changes in wildland firefighter safety policies and practices
Year: 2024
Background: Firefighter safety is a top priority in wildland fire response and management. Existing explanations emphasise how land management agency initiatives to change organisational culture, usually inspired by fatality incidents, contribute to changes both in formal safety policies and informal safety practices. Aims: This paper identifies external factors that lead to changes in wildland firefighter safety policies and practices. Methods: This paper uses qualitative data from a long-term ethnographic research project. Data include…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
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
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
How bureaucracies interact with Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS): a conceptual framework
Year: 2024
BackgroundIndigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS) is contested within settler-colonial contexts, where its development is shaped by complex and dynamic socio-cultural, legal, and political factors. This manuscript draws from the policy sciences to sketch out a “zone of interaction” between IFS and the state’s wildfire policy system. Drawing from the strategies of bureaucracies, our goal is to illustrate the patterns in this “zone of interaction,” and to identify the implications for IFS, as well as for Indigenous Peoples and landscapes.ResultsDrawing insights from the Australian and Canadian…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk, salience, and housing development in the wildland–urban interface
Year: 2023
As wildfires increase in both severity and frequency, understanding the role of risk saliency on human behaviors in the face of fire risks becomes paramount. While research has shown that homebuyers capitalize wildfire risk following a fire, studies of the role that risk saliency plays on residential development is limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the link between wildfire risk saliency and the rate of residential development in wildfire-prone areas, by treating recent wildfires as conditionally exogenous shocks to saliency. Using geospatial data on residential…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Consistent, high-accuracy mapping of daily and sub-daily wildfire growth with satellite observations
Year: 2023
Background: Fire research and management applications, such as fire behaviour analysis and emissions modelling, require consistent, highly resolved spatiotemporal information on wildfire growth progression. Aims: We developed a new fire mapping method that uses quality-assured sub-daily active fire/thermal anomaly satellite retrievals (2003–2020 MODIS and 2012–2020 VIIRS data) to develop a high-resolution wildfire growth dataset, including growth areas, perimeters, and cross-referenced fire information from agency reports. Methods: Satellite fire detections were buffered using a historical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The outsized role of California’s largest wildfires in changing forest burn patterns and coarsening ecosystem scale
Year: 2023
Highlights • We evaluated trends for 1,809 fires that burned 1985–2020 across California forests. • Top 1% of fires by size burned 47% of total area burned across the study period. • Top 1% (18 fires) produced 58% of high and 42% of low-moderate severity area. • Top 1% created novel landscape patterns of large burn severity patches. • These large fires create new opportunities for managing forest resilience. Although recent large wildfires in California forests are well publicized in media and scientific literature, their cumulative effects on forest structure and implications for forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Megafire: An ambiguous and emotive term best avoided by science
Year: 2023
Background
As fire regimes are changing and wildfire disasters are becoming more frequent, the term megafire is increasingly used to describe impactful wildfires, under multiple meanings, both in academia and popular media. This has resulted in a highly ambiguous concept.
Approach
We analysed the use of the term ‘megafire’ in popular media to determine its origin, its developments over time, and its meaning in the public sphere. We subsequently discuss how relative the term ‘mega’ is, and put this in the context of an analysis of Portuguese and global data on fire size distribution.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Connecting dryland fine-fuel assessments to wildfire exposure and natural resource values at risk
Year: 2023
Background Wildland fire in arid and semi-arid (dryland) regions can intensify when climatic, biophysical, and land-use factors increase fuel load and continuity. To inform wildland fire management under these conditions, we developed high-resolution (10-m) estimates of fine fuel across the Altar Valley in southern Arizona, USA, which spans dryland, grass-dominated ecosystems that are administered by multiple land managers and owners. We coupled field measurements at the end of the 2021 growing season with Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and vegetation indices acquired during and after the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Occupational and environmental factors influencing morale of United States federal wildland firefighters
Year: 2023
Background
Wildland firefighters have physically and psychologically demanding jobs that can result in social, economic and health-related stress. Previous studies have examined the physiological and physical effects of a career in wildland fire, but fewer studies have addressed psychological effects, and to date, none have directly analysed the hiring and work experiences of wildland firefighters.
Aims
We surveyed work experiences, health and well-being, and morale of wildland firefighters, explored factors that can improve recruitment and retention, and summarised broad patterns.…
Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
MCDM-Based Wildfire Risk Assessment: A Case Study on the State of Arizona
Year: 2023
The increasing frequency of wildfires has posed significant challenges to communities worldwide. The effectiveness of all aspects of disaster management depends on a credible estimation of the prevailing risk. Risk, the product of a hazard’s likelihood and its potential consequences, encompasses the probability of hazard occurrence, the exposure of assets to these hazards, existing vulnerabilities that amplify the consequences, and the capacity to manage, mitigate, and recover from their consequences. This paper employs the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework, which produces…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modification of Soil Hydroscopic and Chemical Properties Caused by Four Recent California, USA Megafires
Year: 2023
While it is well known that wildfires can greatly contribute to soil water repellency by changing soil chemical composition, the mechanisms of these changes are still poorly understood. In the past decade, the number, size, and intensity of wildfires have greatly increased in the western USA. Recent megafires in California (i.e., the Dixie, Beckwourth Complex, Caldor, and Mosquito fires) provided us with an opportunity to characterize pre- and post-fire soils and to study the effects of fires on soil water repellency, soil organic constituents, and connections between the two. Water drop…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Conceptual Framework for Knowledge Exchange in a Wildland Fire Research and Practice Context
Year: 2023
Wildland fire is an important natural disturbance in many vegetated areas of the world. However, fire management actions are critical not only to prevent and suppress unwanted fires, but also mitigate and recover from the negative impacts of fire on people and communities. Advancements in wildland fire science can help inform these necessary actions in wildland fire management. How science is created and integrated into these fire management decision-making processes, whether through collaborations with external researchers and/or with scientists within a wildland fire management agency…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Proposing a Governance Model for Environmental Crises
Year: 2023
During August 2021, a wildfire outbreak in Evia, Greece’s second largest island, resulted in a major environmental and economic crisis. Apart from biodiversity and habitat loss, the disaster triggered a financial crisis because it wiped out wood-productive forests and outdoor areas that attract visitors. This crisis highlighted the need for a new governance model in order to respond to environmental crises more effectively. The aim of this study was to investigate the acceptance and attitudes of relevant stakeholders towards establishing a Hub—a proposed governance model responsible for…
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