Developing forest lands and agricultural lands for other uses has wide-ranging implications. Land development can affect production from forest and agricultural lands, wildlife habitat quality, the spread of invasive species, water quality, wildfire control, and infrastructure costs.
Prescribed fire is a critical tool for promoting restoration and increasing resilience in fire-adapted ecosystems, but there are barriers to its use, including a shortage of personnel with adequate ecological knowledge and operational expertise to implement prescribed fire across multijurisdictional landscapes.
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States.
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.
Recent fire seasons in the western United States are some of the most damaging and costly on record. Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface on the Colorado Front Range, resulting in thousands of homes burned and civilian fatalities, although devastating, are not without historical reference.
Together with other stressors, interactions between fire and climate change are expressing their potential to drive ecosystem shifts and losses in biodiversity. Closely linked to human well-being in most regions of the globe, fires and their consequences should no longer be regarded as repeated surprise events.
Smoke from forest fires is a serious and increasing land management concern. However, a paucity of information exists that is specific to public perceptions of smoke.
Fire has historically played a fundamental ecological role in many of America’s wildland areas.
Over the past decade, a growing body of research has been conducted on the human dimensions of wildland fire.
Forty-four percent (44%) of voters see uncontrollable wildfires as a serious problem. Equal numbers of voters say wildfires in the country are worse than they were five years ago as say they are about the same. On a personal level, a majority of voters are either more worried about wildfires affecting their own personal safety than they were five years ago, or worried the same amount.