There is a growing professional and public perception that ‘extreme’ wildland fires are becoming more common due to changing climatic conditions. This concern is heightened in the wildland–urban interface where social and ecological effects converge.
Effective wildfire management in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) depends on timely data on forest fuel loading to inform management decisions.
The recent increase in wildfire activity across the rangeland–xeric forest continuum in the western United States has landscape-scale consequences in terms of runoff and erosion.
Mastication is an increasingly common fuels treatment that redistributes “ladder” fuels to the forest floor to reduce vertical fuel continuity, crown fire potential, and fireline intensity, but fuel models do not exist for predicting fire behavior in these fuel types.
Fuel reduction treatments are implemented in the forest surrounding the wildland–urban interface (WUI) to provide defensible space and safe opportunity for the protection of homes during a wildfire.
Fire has historically played a fundamental ecological role in many of America’s wildland areas.
Encouraging the public to take action (e.g., creating defensible space) that can reduce the likelihood of wildfire damage and decrease the likelihood of injury is a common approach to increasing wildfire safety and damage mitigation.
Over the past decade, a growing body of research has been conducted on the human dimensions of wildland fire.
An experimental apparatus has been constructed to generate a controlled and repeatable size and mass distribution of glowing firebrands. The present study reports on a series of experiments conducted in order to characterize the performance of this firebrand generator.
Development owing to population increases over the last 30 years has greatly affected forested lands in the United States. To assess and compare increases in development, we counted changes in the number of structures on a systematic grid of photointerpreted points around public forest land in Washington and Oregon.