Research and Publications
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The Wildland Urban Interface Wildfire Mitigation Desk Reference Guide provides basic background information on relevant programs and terminology for those, whether community members or agency personnel, seeking to enhance their community’s wildfire mitigation efforts.
The four primary objectives of this reference guide are to:
- Provide a reference to assist with integrating wildland urban interface mitigation principles into national wildland fire training;
- Promote common wildfire mitigation language and culture;
- Establish an authoritative source for wildland urban interface mitigation information; and
- Provide consistent definitions for use by all media.
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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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Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge. The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States (US) following a century of fire exclusion. This has translated into calls from scientists and policy experts for more prescribed fire, particularly in the Western US, where fire activity has escalated in recent decades. The annual extent of prescribed burning in the Western US remained stable or decreased from 1998 to 2018, while 70% of all prescribed fire was completed primarily by non-federal entities in the Southeastern US. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the only federal agency to substantially increase prescribed fire use, potentially associated with increased tribal self-governance. This suggests that the best available science is not being adopted into management practices, thereby further compounding the fire deficit in the Western US and the potential for more wildfire disasters.
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Wildland firefighters are exposed to wood smoke, which contains hazardous air pollutants, by suppressing thousands of wildfires across the US each year. Firefighters who worked 49 days per year were exposed to a daily dose of PM4 that ranged from 0.15 mg to 0.74 mg for a 5- and 25-year career, respectively. The daily dose for firefighters working 98 days per year of PM4 ranged from 0.30 mg to 1.49 mg. Across all exposure scenarios (49 and 98 fire days per year) and career durations (5–25 years), we estimated that wildland firefighters were at an increased risk of LC (8 percent to 43 percent) and CVD (16 percent to 30 percent) mortality. This unique approach assessed long term health risks for wildland firefighters and demonstrated that wildland firefighters have an increased risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality.
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This investigation found that most wildland firefighters (WLFFs) sustained at least one injury or illness in the past five fire seasons with a majority of those injuries and illnesses occurring on the fireline on rocky mountainside terrain. Nearly half of the 453 injuries and illnesses reported were sprains and strains occurring to the lower back, knee and ankle. Twenty percent of WLFFs reporting injuries felt that their injury or illness was preventable. With most injuries and illnesses occurring on the fireline, the development of a more targeted, job-specific injury and illness prevention program that focuses on the lower extremities is warranted.
Exploring a multi-disciplinary approach to incorporating traditional knowledge into fuels treatments
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This study sampled 30 plot pairs that were treated or untreated prior to being burned by the North Star Fire and again one growing season post fire. Species diversity was significantly increased by wildfire in both treated and untreated plots. Species richness was significantly increased in the plots that were treated, and there was no significant change in species richness from wildfire within the untreated plots. The percent canopy cover of two of the six culturally important plants (Fragaria spp. and Arnica cordifolia) significantly increased one growing season post wildfire within treated plots and one (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) significantly decreased in the treated plots post wildfire. These post-fire monitoring results were consistent with Confederated Colville Tribal member management recommendations and desired outcomes of understory thinning, prescribed fire, and natural ignition found using Participatory Geographic Information System.
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This analysis revealed that persistent unburned islands are not randomly distributed across the landscape. While the topography and vegetation fuel type that underlie persistent unburned islands differ from burned areas, these differences are dependent upon fire regime group and are less pronounced than what other studies have found. The topographic features that differed the most between persistent unburned islands and burned areas were terrain ruggedness, slope, and transformed aspect. We also found that, as unburned islands increased in persistence (i.e., remained unburned for an increasing number of overlapping fires), they decreased in size and shape complexity.
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Vegetation responses to environmental change may be mediated through changes in bud bank dynamics and phenology. Environmental change that depletes the bud bank or prohibits its formation likely results in a loss of vegetation resilience and plant species diversity. Standardization of bud sampling, examination of bud banks in more ecosystems and their response to environmental variation and disturbance regimes, employment of stage-structured bud bank modelling and evaluation of the cost of bud bank construction and maintenance will benefit this expanding field of research.
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Tackifiers are long‐chain carbon compounds used for soil stabilization and hydroseeding and could provide a vehicle for biological soil crust restoration. We examined the sensitivity of two dryland mosses, Bryum argenteum and Syntrichia ruralis, to three common tackifiers- guar, psyllium, and polyacrylamide (PAM) for erosion control and revegetation. When compared to water, guar tended to decrease growth, psyllium tended to increase growth, and PAM’s effects were generally neutral to positive. Within tackifier types, increasing concentrations of guar tended to decrease growth, while increasing concentrations of psyllium tended to increase growth. Changes in PAM concentrations had little effect on growth. Increases in guar and psyllium lowered pH and increased P and K. Psyllium and PAM yielded promising results as potential agents of dispersal and adherence of dryland mosses in field restoration.
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This study sampled tree age and stand characteristics of isolated aspen forests in the arid Great Basin (USA) to determine if: (1) aspen communities are more fire‐dependent and seral or fire‐independent and stable; (2) ungulate browsing inhibits aspen stability; and (3) temporal patterns of vegetative reproduction (i.e., ramet establishment or “suckering”) are correlated with climate. Aspen size and age class densities strongly fit negative exponential distributions, whether grouped geographically or by functional type, suggesting landscape‐scale persistence. Continuous age distributions and high proportions of recruitment‐sized to overstory trees suggest stability at stand‐scales, with exceptions including stands with higher browsing pressure. Few stands had evidence of fire, and relationships between dead tree size and variability in live tree size suggest a lack of fire‐dependency. Several five‐year averaged climate variables and one sea surface temperature index were correlated with aspen ramet establishment densities over time, with strongest relationships occurring ~5 years prior to establishment year, often followed by inverse relationships ~1 year after. Indeed, aspen establishment density for a recent 41‐year period was reliably reconstructed using antecedent climate conditions derived from a single drought index. Temporally synchronized aspen ramet establishment across the study region may be due to climate‐driven storage of nonstructural carbohydrate reserves in clonal root systems later used for regeneration. Complex regeneration dynamics of these self‐sustaining aspen stands, especially sensitivity to climate variability, suggest they may serve as harbingers of ecological change in the arid Great Basin and in other aspen populations near their range margin.