Skip to main content

Search by keywords, then use filters to narrow down results by type, year, topic, or ecosystem.

Displaying 1 - 20 of 74

Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires. However, a myriad…
Author(s): Christopher J. Dunn, Christopher D. O'Connor, Jesse Abrams, Matthew P. Thompson, David E. Calkin, James D. Johnstone, Richard D. Stratton, Julie W. Gilbertson-Day
Year Published:

Wildfire is a natural element of many ecosystems as well as a natural disaster to be prevented. Climate and land usage changes have increased the number and size of wildfires in the last few decades. In this situation, governments must be able to…
Author(s): Adán Rodríguez-Martínez, Begoña Vitoriano
Year Published:

Quantifying fireline effectiveness (FLE) is essential to evaluate the efficiency of large wildfire management strategies to foster institutional learning and improvement in fire management organizations. FLE performance metrics for incident-level…
Author(s): Benjamin Gannon, Matthew P. Thompson, Kira Z. Deming, Jude Bayham, Yu Wei, Christopher D. O'Connor
Year Published:

Site-specific information concerning fuel hazard characteristics is needed to support wildfire management interventions and fuel hazard reduction programs. Currently, routine visual assessments provide subjective information, with the resulting…
Author(s): Luke Wallace, Bryan Hally, Samuel Hillman, Simon D. Jones, Karin J. Reinke
Year Published:

[from the text] The danger of catastrophic wildfires is increasing around the globe, with large fires occurring in Australia, Canada, Chile, Indonesia, Portugal, Russia, as well as in the United States over the past decade. A major driver globally…
Author(s): John R. Balmes
Year Published:

Over the last decades, the different issues regarding the expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) - particularly those related to fires - have spread around the world with particular exposure in the USA, Canada, Australia, and, more recently…
Author(s): A. Bento-Gonçalves, A. Vieira
Year Published:

Climate change is increasing the risk of extreme events, resulting in social and economic challenges. I examined recent past (1971–2000), current and near future (2010-2039), and future (2040-2069) fire and heat hazard combined with population…
Author(s): Brice B. Hanberry
Year Published:

Wildfire presents a growing threat across the American West. We conducted an online choice experiment in Western Colorado to assess how social interactions affect wildfire mitigation decisions through two distinct pathways: risk interdependency (…
Author(s): Katherine L. Dickinson, Hannah Brenkert-Smith, Greg Madonia, Nicholas Flores
Year Published:

Fire in wetlands is poorly understood, yet hazard reduction burns are a common management practice and bushfires are becoming increasingly prevalent because of climate change. Fire may have long-lasting implications for the microbial component of…
Author(s): Nicole A. Christiansen, Kirstie A. Fryirs, Timothy J. Green, Grant C. Hose
Year Published:

Increases in burned area across the western US since the mid‐1980’s have been widely documented and linked partially to climate factors, yet evaluations of trends in fire severity are lacking. Here, we evaluate fire severity trends and their…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Wildfires are increasingly common in the United States, the result of climate change, altered wildfire regimes, and expanding residential development in close proximity to wildland vegetation. Both suppression expenditures and damages are increasing…
Author(s): Miranda H. Mockrin, Hilary Fishler, Susan I. Stewart
Year Published:

Fire spread on forested landscapes depends on vegetation conditions across the landscape that affect the fire arrival probability and forest stand value. Landowners can control some forest characteristics that facilitate fire spread, and when a…
Author(s): Christopher J. Lauer, Claire A. Montgomery, Thomas G. Dietterich
Year Published:

In 2015, researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program (hereafter U.S. Forest Service), and the University of Córdoba, Forest Engineering Department, Forest Fire…
Author(s): Francisco Rodriguez y Silva, Juan Ramón Molina Martínez, Matthew P. Thompson, Kit O'Connor
Year Published:

An important aspect of predicting future wildland fire risk is estimating fire weather-weather conducive to the ignition and propagation of fire-under realistic climate change scenarios. Because the majority of area burned occurs on a few days of…
Author(s): Piyush Jain, Mari R. Tye, Debasish Paimazumder, Michael D. Flannigan
Year Published:

Research Highlights: Our results suggest that weather is a primary driver of resource orders over the course of extended attack efforts on large fires. Incident Management Teams (IMTs) synthesize information about weather, fuels, and order resources…
Author(s): Jude Bayham, Erin J. Belval, Matthew P. Thompson, Christopher J. Dunn, Crystal S. Stonesifer, David E. Calkin
Year Published:

We present a method to quantify and map the probability of fires reaching the vicinity of assets in a wildfire-prone region, by extending a statistical fire spread model developed on historical fire patterns in the Sydney region, Australia. It…
Author(s): Owen F. Price, Michael Bedward
Year Published:

In many fire-prone watersheds, wildfire threatens surface drinking water sources with eroded contaminants. We evaluated the potential to mitigate the risk of degraded water quality by limiting fire sizes and contaminant loads with a containment…
Author(s): Benjamin Gannon, Yu Wei, Matthew P. Thompson
Year Published:

Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) is a spatial wildfire planning framework that brings together operational fire responses and landscape management goals from Forest Planning documents. It was developed by scientists at the Rocky Mountain…
Author(s): Rocky Mountain Research Station, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute
Year Published:

Accurate maps of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are critical for the development of effective land management policies, conducting risk assessments, and the mitigation of wildfire risk. Most WUI maps identify areas at risk from wildfire by…
Author(s): Michael D. Caggiano, Todd J. Hawbaker, Benjamin Gannon, Chad M. Hoffman
Year Published:

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring…
Author(s): Susan Charnley, Erin C. Kelly, A. Paige Fischer
Year Published: