Human Dimensions of Fire
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This year’s conference, Discover Your Role: Reducing Wildland Fire Risk will provide an in-depth exploration of how community members across the spectrum can effectively contribute to better fire outcomes and provide community wildfire resilience leaders with new knowledge and tools for engaging partners and the public.
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This article analyses homeowners’ decisions to undertake fire-safe investments and create defensible space on their property using a unique dataset from 35 wildland–urban interface communities in Nevada. The dataset combines homeowner information from a mail survey with their observed fire-safe investments obtained through parcel-level hazard assessments. We find that homeowners’ self-reported mitigation expenditures are driven by their subjective beliefs about their wildfire risk, whereas observed defensible space status is driven by their costs of investment. We develop a theoretical model of a homeowner’s fire-safe investment decision that accounts for our empirical results.
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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Socioeconomic Profile tool is a free, web-based tool created by Headwaters Economics to help government agency land managers, economists, planners, outreach specialists, researchers, citizen/private sectors, and others explore socioeconomic conditions near Service units.
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This study compiled and analyzed an extensive dataset of building inspectors’ reports documenting homeowner mitigation practices for more than 40,000 wildfire-exposed structures from 2013–2018. Comparing homes that survived fires to homes that were destroyed, we investigated the role of defensible space distance, defensive actions, and building structural characteristics, statewide and parsed into three broad regions. Overall, structural characteristics explained more of a difference between survived and destroyed structures than defensible space distance. The most consistently important structural characteristics—having enclosed eaves, vent screens, and multi-pane windows—were those that potentially prevented wind-born ember penetration into structures, although multi-pane windows are also known to protect against radiant heat. In the North-Interior part of the state, active firefighting was the most important reason for structure survival. Overall, the deviance explained for any given variable was relatively low, suggesting that other factors need to be accounted for to understand the full spectrum of structure loss contributors. Furthermore, while destroyed homes were preferentially included in the study, many “fire-safe” structures, having > 30 m defensible space or fire-resistant building materials, were destroyed. Thus, while mitigation may play an important role in structure survival, additional strategies should be considered to reduce future structure loss.
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This study presents the development and evaluation of a spatial fire danger index that can be used to assess historical events, forecast extreme fire danger, and communicate those conditions to both firefighters and the public. It uses two United States National Fire Danger Rating System indices that are related to fire intensity and spread potential. These indices are normalized, combined, and categorized based on a 39-yr climatology (1979–2017) to produce a single, categorical metric called the Severe Fire Danger Index (SFDI) that has five classes; Low, Moderate, High, Very High, and Severe. We evaluate the SFDI against the number of newly reported wildfires and total area burned from agency fire reports (1992–2017) as well as daily remotely sensed numbers of active fire pixels and total daily fire radiative power for large fires (2003–2016) from the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) across the conterminous United States. We show that the SFDI adequately captures geographic and seasonal variations of fire activity and intensity, where 58% of the eventual area burned reported by agency fire records, 75.2% of all MODIS active large fire pixels, and 81.2% of all fire radiative power occurred when the SFDI was either Very High or Severe (above the 90th percentile).
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This study specifically surveyed county emergency managers; the individuals who are responsible for mitigating and responding to disaster events. The results suggest that emergency managers are subject to decision biases and by knowing this, we can improve emergency management and decision-making processes.
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This collection of essays—divided into three key categories: Risk, Culture, and Operations—daylights qualities and practices in the wildland fire service across a broad spectrum, from outdated and unwarranted to honorable and profound. We must acknowledge our current culture and its shortcomings while using its strengths to lead change.
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This study found that emergency managers exhibit some of the same decision biases, sensitivity to framing, and heuristics found in studies of the general public, even when making decisions in their area of expertise. A national survey of county-level emergency managers finds that managers appear more risk averse when the outcomes of actions are framed as gains than when equivalent outcomes are framed as losses, a finding that is consistent with prospect theory. The study also found that the perceived actions of emergency managers in neighboring jurisdictions affect the choices a manager makes. In addition, our managers show evidence of attribution bias, outcome bias, and difficulties processing numerical information, particularly probabilities compared to frequencies. Each of these departures from perfect rationality points to potential shortfalls in public managers’ decision making. There are opportunities to improve decision making through reframing problems, providing training in structured decision-making processes, and employing different choice architectures to nudge behavior in a beneficial direction
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This study, which can be found in the journal PLoS One, suggests that people of color, especially Native Americans, face more risk from wildfires than whites. It is another example of how the kinds of disasters exacerbated by climate change often hit minorities and the poor the hardest.
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The flow of ecosystem services derived from forests and grasslands in the Southwestern United States may change in the future. People and communities may be vulnerable if they are exposed, are sensitive, and have limited ability to adapt to ecological changes. Geospatial descriptions of ecosystem services, projected climate-related ecological changes, and socioeconomic conditions are used to assess socioeconomic vulnerability to changes in the provision of ecosystem services by national forests and grasslands in the Southwest. Vulnerability is uneven in the Southwest due to varying projected effects of climate on forest ecosystem services, and different levels of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of people in the region.