Risk Assessment and Analysis
Homeowner firewise behaviors in fire-prone central Oregon: An exploration of the attitudinal, situational, and cultural worldviews impacting pre-fire mitigation actions
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
As a result of climate change and past management practices, wildfires are becoming larger and occurring more frequently than ever before in the Western U.S. In order to mitigate the effects of this growing threat, fire management agencies such as the U.S.
Identifying building locations in the wildland–urban interface before and after fires with convolutional neural networks
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Background: Wildland–urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated owing to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown.
Performance of Fire Danger Indices and Their Utility in Predicting Future Wildfire Danger Over the Conterminous United States
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Predicting current and future wildfire frequency and size is central to wildfire control and management. Multiple fire danger indices (FDIs) that incorporate weather and fuel conditions have been developed and utilized to support wildfire predictions and risk assessment.
Modeling Wildland Firefighters’ Assessments of Structure Defensibility
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility.
Optimizing the implementation of a forest fuel break network
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires.
Lightning-Ignited Wildfires in the Western United States: Ignition Precipitation and Associated Environmental Conditions
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Cloud-to-ground lightning with minimal rainfall (“dry” lightning) is a major wildfire ignition source in the western United States (WUS). Although dry lightning is commonly defined as occurring with <2.5 mm of daily-accumulated precipitation, a rigorous quantification of precipitation amounts concurrent with lightning-ignited wildfires (LIWs) is lacking.
MCDM-Based Wildfire Risk Assessment: A Case Study on the State of Arizona
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
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.
Avoided wildfire impact modeling with counterfactual probabilistic analysis
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
Assessing the effectiveness and measuring the performance of fuel treatments and other wildfire risk mitigation efforts are challenging endeavors. Perhaps the most complicated is quantifying avoided impacts. In this study, we show how probabilistic counterfactual analysis can help with performance evaluation.
Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests
Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type
The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in both scientific and policy venues.