Communicating about Fire

The Dry Forest Zone (DFZ) is a five-year project to address common natural resource-based economic development challenges through increased networking and capacity building at a regional scale.

Fire-prone landscapes are not well studied as coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) and present many challenges for understanding and promoting adaptive behaviors and institutions.

With more people than ever living in the vicinity of the wildland-urban interface, communicating wildland fire management activities and building trust with the public is paramount for safety.

The Fire Learning Network is part of the “Promoting Ecosystem Resilience and Fire Adapted Communities Together: Collaborative Engagement, Collective Action and CoOwnership of Fire” cooperative agreement among The Nature Conservancy, USDA Forest Service and agencies of the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park

For many thousands of years, aboriginal peoples worldwide used fire to manage landscapes. In NorthAmerica, the frequency and extent of fire (both human caused and natural) were much reduced afterEuropean colonization. Fire exclusion became the policy in the United States for most of the 20thcentury as the country became more settled and industrialized.

A key problem reported by the fuels treatment planning community is the difficulty and inefficiency of evaluating and then applying many planning tools and applications.

The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), in partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology,offers Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) awards yearly to a handful of top-quality graduatestudents conducting research in fire science.

Describing the 2013 summer fire season, the Oregon Department of Forestry called it “epic.” On those lands protected by the state, it was the costliest ever, and the first time in over 60 years that more than 100,000 acres burned. Oregon’s forests are changing. The management objectives and priorities of federal and private landowners are evolving.

California’s chaparral plant community composition can change when fire is followed by intense drought. By measuring postfire population demography coupled with physiological measurements during a severe drought, Pratt et al.