Research and Publications
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Minimizing vulnerability of rangeland cores to annual grass conversion includes reducing exposure to annual grass seed sources, improving resilience and resistance by promoting perennial plants, and building capacity of communities and partnerships to adapt to changing conditions and respond to the problem with appropriate actions in a timely manner.
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The most stressed recommendation was that “getting the people part right” should be the priority consideration when setting up a CAM project. Actively engaging with communities from the very start is essential for developing practical solutions. Communities need to view the project as being consistent with community values and benefitting those communities. Supporting people with leadership qualities who are passionately supportive of the project is important for converting plans to action. Relationship- and capacity-building efforts that encourage productive interactions are essential for developing working relationships that enable implementation and long-term cooperation. Projects should be structured to take advantage of partners’ particular strengths and available resources; effective and timely actions are achieved most easily at smaller scales but need to be coordinated within the context of larger issues. Great value can be obtained by simply moving away from formal implementation of AM toward actions to improve the management system’s capacity to achieve success. Additional studies of smaller scale projects could provide useful information about effective approaches to capacity building.
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Traditional fire practitioners are working to resist the impact of settler colonialism and reestablish cultural burning to promote traditional foods and materials, exercise their sovereignty in land management, and strengthen their communities’ cultural, physical and emotional wellbeing. Despite broad support for cultural burning, the needs of practitioners are often poorly understood by non-Native people, limiting the potential for productive cross-cultural partnerships and programs and services that serve Indigenous nations and communities. This article describes lessons learned from two Indigenous Fire Workshops that brought together cultural fire practitioners, researchers, agency and NGO representatives and members of the public to learn about the use and benefits of cultural burning in California.
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Across fires and NGOs, NGO management and wellbeing, coordination and disaster experiences emerge as common barriers and enablers of relief and recovery. In many cases, local NGOs’ participation in wildfire relief and recovery included simultaneous expansion of an organisation’s mission and activities and negative impacts on staff mental health. Under the rapidly evolving circumstances of relief and the prolonged burdens of recovery, personal relationships across NGOs and government agencies significantly improved coordination of assistance to communities. Finally, interviewees expressed greater confidence when responding to wildfires if they had previous experience with a disaster, although the COVID-19 pandemic presented distinct challenges on top of pre-existing long-term recovery work.
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We conducted 53 interviews across four case studies in the western United States where federal land management agencies and cooperative actors are working together to accelerate the implementation of prescribed fire to understand the range of actors and associated roles they play. We found that interviewees identified 67 different organizations spanning local to national scales that played a variety of roles to support prescribed fire implementation, mainly communications, prescribed burn labor, fundraising, burning expertise, and burning on neighboring lands. Many actors did not serve in intentional bridging roles, but they filled key roles in the governance networks necessary to implement prescribed fire.
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The case study research presented in this article evaluates social characteristics present in a WUI community that faces extreme wildfire risk to both people and property. It explores social processes that impede the ability of community members to work together collectively to solve problems (e.g., wildfire risk) and offers an alternative perspective about the nature of residency status (i.e., full-time and non-full-time) and its role in influencing wildfire mitigation efforts.
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Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other collaborative governance regimes (CGRs). We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our analysis is informed by a synthesis of the literature, case examples and exemplars from focus groups, and a national CFLRP survey.
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Wildfire can significantly alter the hydrologic response of a watershed to the extent that even modest rainstorms can produce dangerous flash floods and debris flows. The USGS conducts post-fire debris-flow hazard assessments for select fires in the Western U.S. We use geospatial data related to basin morphometry, burn severity, soil properties, and rainfall characteristics to estimate the probability and volume of debris flows that may occur in response to a design storm.
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Communities across the United States and the globe rely on clean water flowing from forested watersheds. But these water source areas are impacted by the effects of wildfire. To help water providers and land managers prepare for impacts from wildfire on water supplies, the U.S. Geological Survey is working to measure and predict post-fire water quality and quantity.
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Katherine Zeller, a research biologist with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute housed within the Rocky Mountain Research Station, was part of a team of researchers who created a series of species distribution models to determine whether this concern was warranted. “What we wanted to know is how these conifer treatments might affect a greater suite of species,” she explains. “Not just the sage grouse but these other species of conservation concern.”