Research and Publications
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Adequate numbers of replicated, dispersed, and random samples are the basis for reliable sampling inference on resources of concern, particularly vegetation cover across large and heterogenous areas such as rangelands. Tools are needed to predict and assess data precision, specifically the sampling effort required to attain acceptable levels of precision, before and after sampling. We describe and evaluate a flexible and scalable process for assessing the sampling effort requirement for a common monitoring context (responses of rangeland vegetation cover to post-fire restoration treatments), using a custom R script called “SampleRange.” In SampleRange, vegetation cover is estimated from available digital-gridded or field data (e.g., using the satellite-derived cover from the Rangeland Assessment Platform). Next, the sampling effort required to estimate cover with 20% relative standard error (RSE) or to saturate sampling effort is determined using simulations across the environmental gradients in areas of interest to estimate the number of needed plots (“SampleRange quota”). Finally, the SampleRange quota are randomly identified for actual sampling. A 2022 full-cycle trial of SampleRange using the best available digital and prior field data for areas treated after a 2017 wildfire in sagebrush-steppe rangelands revealed that differences in the predicted compared with realized RSEs are inevitable. Future efforts to account for uncertainty in remotely sensed−based vegetative products will enhance tool utility.
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The sagebrush biome is a dryland region in the western United States experiencing rapid transformations to novel ecological states. Threat-based approaches for managing anthropogenic and ecosystem threats have recently become prominent, but successfully mitigating threats depends on the ecological resilience of ecosystems. We used a spatially explicit approach for prioritizing management actions that combined a threat-based model with models of resilience to disturbance and resistance to annual grass invasion. The threat-based model assessed geographic patterns in sagebrush ecological integrity (SEI) to identify core sagebrush, growth opportunity, and other rangeland areas. The resilience and resistance model identified ecologically relevant climate and soil water availability indicators from process-based ecohydrological models. The SEI areas and resilience and resistance indicators were consistent – the resilience and resistance indicators showed generally positive relationships with the SEI areas. They also were complementary – SEI areas provided information on intact sagebrush areas and threats, while resilience and resistance provided information on responses to disturbances and management actions. The SEI index and resilience and resistance indicators provide the basis for prioritizing conservation and restoration actions and determining appropriate strategies. The difficulty and time required to conserve or restore SEI areas increase as threats increases and resilience and resistance decrease.
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Using data on the patterns of participation of 10,199 individual stakeholders in 837 community wildfire protection plans (CWPPs) within the western U.S., we document the emergence of a locally clustered but spatially extensive wildfire risk governance network. Our evaluation of factors that contribute to connectivity within this network indicates that risk interdependence (e.g., joint exposure to the same fires) between planning jurisdictions increases the prospects for linkages between planning processes, and that connectivity is also more likely among planning processes that are more proximate and similar to one another. We discuss how our results advance understanding of how changing hazard conditions prompt risk mitigation policy networks to reorganize, which in turn affects risk outcomes at multiple spatial scales.
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The pathways tool provides a series of empirically informed processes, choices, and engagement tactics designed to foster shared agreement about the best practices for wildfire adaptation across site-specific local conditions. We outline how the tool can advance adaptation processes for a variety of users, including (1) a community oriented planning process that will help reinforce or catalyze collective action about fire management, (2) a systematic approach for monitoring differential progress toward development of fire-adapted communities, and (3) a potential feedback mechanism that informs programmatic foci or allocation of future resources across potential actions designed for diverse social conditions.
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This concept paper presents a Stages of Collaborative Readiness framework. Collaborative, multi-party entities provide fundamental roles and contributions to prepare landscapes and communities to receive and recover from wildfire (identifying, connecting, and aligning stakeholders; co-developing strategies at scale; synchronizing operations; and facilitating science informed, continuous learning). The framework applies insights from the collaborative development literature to the context of forest and wildland fire risk management. It embeds the fundamental roles and contributions within a four-stage framework, identifying stage appropriate benchmarks and outcomes to increase the ability of a collaborative over time to serve those important functions.
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The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where structures and other human development intermingle with wildland vegetation or where housing is in the vicinity of large areas of wildland vegetation. This story map provides data on two trends from 1990 to 2020: the expansion of WUI area and the growth in housing in WUI areas.
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In this article, we highlight strategies that Indigenous communities and scholars are employing to approach wildfire management. We start by introducing the reader to the colonial ecological violence that has resulted from the exclusion of fire and the ways that communities resist the settler colonial paradigm of fire suppression. We then analyze the role of militarism and incarceration within the “fire industrial complex.” Militarism and incarceration have been a part of settler colonial fire suppression in California since the beginning even as they emerge in novel forms in the twenty-first century, and they pose a challenge to regenerative and sovereign Indigenous fire futures. Next, we guide the reader through debates on Indigenous “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK) and the ways that fire science variously erases, homogenizes, or romanticizes the epistemologically and politically complex practices of Indigenous burners. We advocate that scholars avoid participating in an extractive “TEK rush” and instead enter into direct relationships of accountability and collaboration with Indigenous fire practitioners. We conclude by discussing the ways Indigenous communities build anticolonial movements to assert sovereignty—fire and otherwise—based on reciprocal and relational systems for people and ecosystems. By reframing the current wildfire crisis through the lens of settler colonialism, we bypass unilateral, settler-driven solutions and emphasize that respect for Indigenous fire sovereignty—not only Indigenous fire knowledge—is essential for actualizing just fire futures in California and beyond.
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It is not well understood whether desert plantings can facilitate recruitment of other natives (or mainly just non-natives), or whether facilitation changes through time as a restoration site matures. To address these uncertainties, we partnered with the National Park Service to study plant community change below planted perennials and in interspaces (areas between perennials) during 12 years (2009-2020) in Joshua Tree National Park, California, in the southern Mojave Desert.
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This study uses tree cores gathered at three 4-hectare plots to make inferences about temporal aspects of tree recruitment in pine-dominated ecosystems of the California Sierra Nevada and the Sierra San Petro Martir in northwestern Mexico.
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We present an easily replicable approach to calculate the economic cost from carbon released instantaneously from wildfires at state and county level (US). Our approach is straightforward and relies exclusively on publicly available data that can be easily obtained for locations throughout the USA. We also describe how to apply social cost of carbon estimates to the carbon loss estimates to find the economic value of carbon released from wildfires. We demonstrate our approach using a case study of the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire in Oregon. Our estimated value of carbon lost for this medium-sized (19,400 ha) fire is $187.2 million (2020 dollars), which highlights the significant role that wildfires can have in terms of carbon emissions and their associated cost. The emissions from this fire were equivalent to as much as 2.3% of non-fire emissions for the state of Oregon in 2020.