research briefs

The wildfires that ignited September 7-9, 2020 (collectively named the “Labor Day Fires”) on the west side of the Oregon Cascades (Westside) were a devastating reminder that these communities and forests are at risk from wildfires. The fires collectively burned more than 2.2 million acres, caused fatalities and billions of dollars in damage, placed more than 10% of the state’s residents under evacuation advisories, and created hazardous air quality conditions across the northwestern US. The fires left researchers, practitioners, and local residents questioning how to better expect and prepare for similar events in the future. The three articles summarized in this brief focused on the challenges of understanding and communicating about wildfire surprises and risk in Westside systems, and how to better predict where similar events might happen in the future. A fourth article summarizes the key meteorological drivers behind the Labor Day fires.

The Palouse Prairie is a highly endangered ecosystem found along the Idaho–Washington border. The Palouse Prairie intermixes with the imperiled ponderosa pine savanna along this border, making the ecotone between these communities particularly diverse and ecologically important. Unfortunately, like many grassland and savanna communities across North America and the world, this rich prairie–pine ecotone is now highly fragmented and degraded.

For this study, researchers conducted 54 key informant interviews across the 11 western states to investigate policy-relatedbarriers to prescribed fire on federal lands. In particular, they examined how laws, policies, and policy implementationaffect prescribed fire application, and identified common challenges to and opportunities for increasing application.

In this study, researchers examined print media coverage, data of burned homes, and demographic data of towns impacted by two major wildfires in Washington State. The Carlton Complex burned over 250,000 acres and hundreds of homes in the Methow Valley in 2014, becoming the largest wildfire in Washington’s history. In 2015, the fires that made up the Okanogan Complex burned over 300,000 acres in the same part of northcentral Washington, destroying hundreds more structures and resulting in three firefighter fatalities. Researchers investigated the topics that were prominent and that were ignored in the media coverage of these two wildfires. In particular, they examined media coverage related to wildfire risk and firefighter safety, and compared the locations focused on in the media coverage of the fires in relation to the locations with the greatest damage from the fires.

In this study, the authors characterized historical fire return intervals, seasonality, and relationships with local and regional factors for 13 sites representative of southwestern Oregon dry forests on ridges and midslopes in the Rogue Basin of the Klamath Ecoregion. They used dendrochronology (cross-dated fire-scars from trees) to develop fire histories. Then using a systematic literature review, the authors were able to link local fire histories to a regional dataset and evaluate the data relative to more intensively studied conifer/hardwood forest types in California.

In this study, researchers measured vegetation structure and fuel moisture (pre-burn), weather conditions, belowground heat dosages, and peak temperatures (during the burn), and burn severities and unburned refugia (post-burn) for paired morning and afternoon prescribed burns at each of ten prairie sites throughout the south Puget Sound in 2014.

This study examined stakeholder perspectives on reference conditions among collaboratives engaged in the restoration of dry, fire-adapted forest landscapes managed by the U.S. Forest Service. In particular, the authors examined social perspectives that influenced the determination of ecological reference conditions. They interviewed stakeholders associated with six collaborative groups from different geographic, biophysical, and social contexts in the western United States. All groups were funded by the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP).

In this paper, researchers examined the design and outcomes of RFPA programs in Oregon and Idaho through comparative studies of four established RFPAs. They set out to understand whether and how the design and implementation of state programs and interactions with BLM fire professionals allowed ranchers to participate on the fireline, encouraged adaptive learning, and fostered engagement in proactive fire preparation as well as suppression.

In this study, researchers interviewed 48 residents, community leaders, and professionals involved in wildfire and forest management during the 2006 Columbia Complex Fire in southeastern Washington State. The fire burned 109,402 acres of grain, pasture, and forest as well as 28 structures around Dayton, WA and was managed at different stages by teams from all three levels of the Incident Command (IC) system, with multiple state, federal, and international fire teams involved. Conflict surrounding the fires’ management was covered by the media. Researchers interviewed local community members (external IC team members were not interviewed) about the roots of the conflict between local rural residents and the external Incident Command system. In particular, they sought to identify specific elements of social interaction and underlying structure that led to tensions with Incident Command teams during the wildfire, and whether the conflict persisted long-term.