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Background Prescribed fire is a critical tool for building resilience to changing fire regimes. Policymakers can accelerate the development of effective, adaptation-oriented fire governance by learning from other jurisdictions. Aims We analyse…
Author(s): Phillipa C. McCormack, Rebecca K. Miller, Jan McDonald
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Background: Current guidance for implementation of United States federal wildland fire policy charges agencies with restoring and maintaining fire-adapted ecosystems while limiting the extent of wildfires that threaten life and property, weighed…
Author(s): Bradley Pietruszka, Jesse Young, Karen C. Short, Lise A. St. Denis, Matthew P. Thompson, David E. Calkin
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The growing scale of natural hazards highlights the need for models of governance capable of addressing risk across administrative boundaries. However, risk governance systems are often fragmented, decentralized, and sustained by informal linkages…
Author(s): Matthew Hamilton, Max Nielson-Pincus, Cody Evers
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In December 2022, twenty-one experts from land management agencies, Tribes, and organizations from across the country convened at the Wilderness and Fire Workshop in Gunnison, Colorado to consider the effects of over a century of fire exclusion on…
Author(s): Center for Public Lands Western Colorado University, USFS Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute,
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This is a summary from the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Fire Science Workshop held June 27-28, 2023. It summarizes discussion points from the first day's breakout groups as well as some key discussion points from…
Year Published:

Background: Current guidance for implementation of United States federal wildland fire policy charges agencies with restoring and maintaining fire-adapted ecosystems while limiting the extent of wildfires that threaten life and property, weighed…
Author(s): Bradley Pietruszka, Jesse Young, Karen C. Short, Lise A. St. Denis, Matthew P. Thompson, David E. Calkin
Year Published:

In recent years, the state of Colorado has experienced extreme wildfire events that have degraded forest and watershed health and devastated human communities. With expanding human development and a changing climate, wildfire activity is likely to…
Author(s): Erin J. Belval, Matthew P. Thompson
Year Published:

Wilderness areas are important natural laboratories for scientists and managers working to understand fire. In the last half-century, shifts in the culture and policy of land management agencies have facilitated the management practice of letting…
Author(s): Mark R. Kreider, Melissa Jaffe, Julia Berkey, Sean A. Parks, Andrew J. Larson
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This is a synthesis of the research priorities from the 2023 Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Fire Science Workshop as identified by participants. 
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Background: Virtually every decision within wildland fire management includes substantial ethical dimensions. As pressures increase with ever-growing fires, it is becoming increasingly important to develop tools for assessing and acting on the…
Author(s): Dyllan Goldstein, Eric B. Kennedy
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Forest biomass use for energy production is not only an increasingly popular renewable source of energy, but has also been proposed as a tool for forest management, which can help reduce the incidence of forest fires. Similarly, an adequate…
Author(s): Lígia Costa Pinto, Sara Sousa, Marieta Valente
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Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s, it was becoming apparent that not…
Author(s): Courtney Schultz, Jesse Abrams, Emily Jane Davis, Anthony S. Cheng, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Cassandra Moseley
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Societies must learn to live with, and adapt to wildfire risk. Here we examine wildfire governance and policy in British Columbia (BC), Canada over the last two decades, to examine how policy lessons are drawn from wildfire events. We focus on…
Author(s): William Nikolakis, Emma Roberts
Year Published:

A severe outbreak of wildfire across the US Pacific Coast during August 2020 led to persistent fire activity through the end of summer. In late September, Fire Weather Outlooks predicted higher than usual fire activity into the winter in parts of…
Author(s): Erin J. Belval, Karen C. Short, Crystal S. Stonesifer, David E. Calkin
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Western North American sagebrush shrublands and steppe face accelerating risks from fire-driven feedback loops that transition these ecosystems into self-reinforcing states dominated by invasive annual grasses. In response, sagebrush conservation…
Author(s): Thomas J. Rodhouse, Jeffrey Lonneker, Lisa Bowersock, Diana Popp, Jamela C. Thompson, Gordon H. Dicus, Kathryn M. Irvine
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Prescribed fire is an essential management tool for restoring and maintaining the resilience of fire-dependent ecosystems. Past studies indicated that the current policy environment significantly constrained decision-making around prescribed fire (…
Author(s): Courtney Schultz, Cassandra Moseley, Adell L. Amos, Christopher Bone, Sarah M. McCaffrey
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National forests in the western United States are divided roughly in half between lands without roads managed for wilderness characteristics and lands with an extensive road system managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. We…
Author(s): James D. Johnston, John B. Kilbride, Garrett W. Meigs, Christopher J. Dunn, Robert E. Kennedy
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Decision support systems (DSSs) are increasingly common in forest and wildfire planning and management in the United States. Recent policy direction and frameworks call for collaborative assessment of wildfire risk to inform fuels treatment…
Author(s): Melanie M. Colavito
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Wildfire activity in the western United States has been increasing since the 1970s, with many fires occurring on land managed by government agencies. Over six million acres of public lands are surrounded by private land and lack road access, making…
Author(s): Bryan Leonard, Andrew J. Plantinga, Matthew J. Wibbenmeyer
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To support improved wildfire incident decision-making, in 2017 the US Forest Service (Forest Service) implemented risk-informed tools and processes, together known as Risk Management Assistance (RMA). The Forest Service is developing tools such as…
Author(s): Courtney Schultz, Lauren Miller, S. Michelle Greiner, Chad Kooistra
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