Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 24
Re-Envisioning Wildland Fire Governance: Addressing the Transboundary, Uncertain, and Contested Aspects of Wildfire
Year: 2022
Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem. For instance, while wildfire is often described as a cross-boundary problem, understanding wildfire risk as transboundary highlights important political and institutional challenges that complicate collaboration across jurisdictions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human- and lightning-caused wildland fire ignition clusters in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire ignitions in BC using data from 2006 to 2020. We found that human-caused ignition clusters tended to occur around population centres, First Nations communities, roads and valleys, and were more common in the southern half of the province, which is more populated. Lightning-ignition clusters were generally…
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
What do you mean, ‘megafire’?
Year: 2022
Background ‘Megafire’ is an emerging concept commonly used to describe fires that are extreme in terms of size, behaviour, and/or impacts, but the term’s meaning remains ambiguous. Approach We sought to resolve ambiguity surrounding the meaning of ‘megafire’ by conducting a structured review of the use and definition of the term in several languages in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. We collated definitions and descriptions of megafire and identified criteria frequently invoked to define megafire. We recorded the size and location of megafires and mapped them to reveal global…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Relationships between building features and wildfire damage in California, USA and Pedrógão Grande, Portugal
Year: 2022
Background: Buildings in communities near wildlands, in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), can experience wildfire damage.Aims: To quantitatively assess the relationship between building features and damage, a building wildfire resistance index is developed and validated with the 2013–2017 CAL FIRE (DINS) database from California, USA, and the 2017 Pedrógão Grande Fire Complex post-fire investigation from Portugal.Methods: Three statistical dependence tests are compared to evaluate the relationship between selected building features and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Annual forest area burned (AFAB) in the western United States (US) has increased as a positive exponential function of rising aridity in recent decades. This non-linear response has important implications for AFAB in a changing climate, yet the cause of the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship has not been given rigorous attention. We investigated the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship in western US forests using a new 1984–2019 database of fire events and 2001–2020 satellite-based records of daily fire growth. While forest-fire frequency and duration grow linearly with aridity, the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Large wildfire driven increases in nighttime fire activity observed across CONUS from 2003–2020
Year: 2022
Despite the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of wildfires, little attention has been paid to the spatiotemporal patterns of nighttime fire activity across the conterminous United States (CONUS). Daytime fire radiative power (FRP) detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) was nearly evenly split (54% vs. 46%) between inside and outside wildfires from 2003 to 2020. In contrast, 94% of nighttime FRP was detected within wildfires, of which 95% was detected within large wildfires (> 2023 ha). Nighttime proportions (i.e., the proportion of total summed FRP…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Communicating with the public about wildland fire preparation, response, and recovery: a review of recent literature
Year: 2022
This review paper synthesizes peer-reviewed empirical research published between 2010 and 2021 about wildland fire communication practices. Our goal was to systematically review and provide an overview of how wildland fire communication has been empirically studied, and theoretical and methodological underpinnings and representativeness of this work. We found that researchers employ diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, yet most work originates from the western United States or Australia. Studies were published in diverse disciplinary journals, most frequently looked at residents…
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 Costs and Costs Avoided From Wildfire Fire Management—A Conceptual Framework for a Value of Information Analysis
Year: 2022
Wildfire is an integral part of many ecosystems, and wildland fires also have the potential for costly impacts to human health and safety, and damage to structures and natural resources. Public land managers use various strategies for managing landscape conditions that can affect wildfire, broadly: fuel treatment (and other pre-fire risk mitigation), fire suppression, and post-fire landscape rehabilitation. However, with any of these strategies there is considerable uncertainty in the outcomes that managers can obtain, and thus on the societal costs and benefits associated with wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contemporary (1984–2020) fire history metrics for the conterminous United States and ecoregional differences by land ownership
Year: 2022
Background: Remotely sensed burned area products are critical to support fire modelling, policy, and management but often require further processing before use. Aim: We calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) including (1) fire frequency, (2) time since last burn (TSLB), (3) year of last burn, (4) longest fire-free interval, (5) average fire interval length, and (6) contemporary fire return interval (cFRI). Methods: Metrics were summarised by ecoregion and land ownership, and related to historical and cheatgrass…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Characterization of Fire-Management Research: A Bibliometric Review of Global Networks and Themes
Year: 2022
Although humans have interacted with wildfires for millennia, a science-based approach to fire management has evolved in recent decades. This paper reviews the development of firemanagement research, focusing on publications that use this term in their title, abstract, or keywords identified on the Scopus platform. This resulted in the identification of 5624 documents published between 1973 and 2021. Publication rates have particularly increased since 2010. The paper details the characteristics of this body of the literature, including the main authors, institutions, and countries.…
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
Mapping the ethical landscape of wildland fire management: setting an agendum for research and deliberation on the applied ethics of wildland fire
Year: 2022
Background: Virtually every decision within wildland fire management includes substantial ethical dimensions. As pressures increase with ever-growing fires, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools for assessing and acting on the values intrinsic to wildfire management. Aims: This paper aims to foster an applied ethics of wildland fire by bringing values to the forefront of wildland fire management debates, highlighting areas where ethical issues have been previously discussed, and providing a framework to assist in future discussion. Methods: Through a literature review and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Regional-Scale Wildland Fire Emissions with the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System
Year: 2014
As carbon modeling tools become more comprehensive, spatialdata are needed to improve quantitative maps of carbon emissions from fire.The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) provides mappedestimates of carbon emissions from historical forest fires in the United Statesthrough a web browser. WFEIS improves access to data and provides a consistentapproach to estimating emissions at landscape, regional, and continentalscales. The system taps into data and tools developed by the U.S. Forest Serviceto describe fuels, fuel loadings, and fuel consumption and merges informationfrom the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland firefighter safety zones: a review of past science and summary of future needs
Year: 2014
Current wildland firefighter safety zone guidelines are based on studies that assume flat terrain, radiant heating, finite flame width, constant flame temperature and high flame emissivity. Firefighter entrapments and injuries occur across a broad range of vegetation, terrain and atmospheric conditions generally when they are within two flame heights of the fire. Injury is not confined to radiant heating or flat terrain; consequently, convective heating should be considered as a potential heating mode. Current understanding of energy transport in wildland fires is briefly summarised, followed…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Regional projections of the likelihood of very large wildland fires under a changing climate in the contiguous Western United States
Year: 2014
Seasonal changes in the climatic potential for very large wildfires (VLWF ≥ 50,000 ac ~ 20,234 ha) across the western contiguous United States are projected over the 21st century using generalized linear models and downscaled climate projections for two representative concentration pathways (RCPs). Significant (p ≤ 0.05) increases in VLWF probability for climate of the mid-21st century (2031–2060) relative to contemporary climate are found, for both RCP 4.5 and 8.5. The largest differences are in the Eastern Great Basin, Northern Rockies, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland fire emissions, carbon, and climate: Modeling fuel consumption
Year: 2014
Fuel consumption specifies the amount of vegetative biomass consumed during wildland fire. It is a two-stage process of pyrolysis and combustion that occurs simultaneously and at different rates depending on the characteristics and condition of the fuel, weather, topography, and in the case of prescribed fire, ignition rate and pattern. Fuel consumption is the basic process that leads to heat absorbing emissions called greenhouse gas and other aerosol emissions that can impact atmospheric and ecosystem processes, carbon stocks, and land surface reflectance. It is a critical requirement for…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The role of defensible space for residential structure protection during wildfires
Year: 2014
With the potential for worsening fire conditions, discussion is escalating over how to best reduce effects on urban communities. A widely supported strategy is the creation of defensible space immediately surrounding homes and other structures. Although state and local governments publish specific guidelines and requirements, there is little empirical evidence to suggest how much vegetation modification is needed to provide significant benefits. We analysed the role of defensible space by mapping and measuring a suite of variables on modern pre-fire aerial photography for 1000 destroyed and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severity of an uncharacteristically large wildfire, the Rim Fire, in forests with relatively restored frequent fire regimes
Year: 2014
The 2013 Rim Fire, originating on Forest Service land, burned into old-growth forests within Yosemite National Park with relatively restored frequent-fire regimes (¡Ý2 predominantly low and moderate severity burns within the last 35 years). Forest structure and fuels data were collected in the field 3-4 years before the fire, providing a rare chance to use pre-existing plot data to analyze fire effects. We used regression tree and random forests analysis to examine the influence of forest structure, fuel, fire history, topographic and weather conditions on observed fire severity in the Rim…
Publication Type: Journal Article