Research and Publications
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This study finds negligible cost differences between a typical home and a home constructed using wildfire-resistant materials and design features. Decades of research and post-fire assessments have provided clear evidence that building materials and design, coupled with landscaping on the property, are the most important factors influencing home survivability during a wildfire.
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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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This paper presents a reflexive examination of how and why we, an academic and a practitioner, arrive at different evaluations of collaborative progress in natural resource management. We situate this examination in our long-standing involvement in designing, adaptively managing, and participating in the Uncompahgre Plateau collaborative forest restoration project in western Colorado, USA.
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To create a better road map for scientists, researchers interviewed Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. Congress to ask what advice they would give the scientific community to help it improve the way it communicates with policymakers. The sample, which included 22 members of Congress and 20 staff members, was an even mix of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. This was then combined with the feedback from a random survey of more than 600 scientist members of AAAS, more than half of whom had experience communicating with policymakers.
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This collection represents collective insight into how we operate and why we must alter some of our most ingrained practices and perspectives.
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This report synthesizes our current knowledge on mastication as a forest management tool. We found that excavators, skid steers, and tractors can all be carrier machines and different types of vertical and horizontal cutting heads exist that can be front-end mounted or boom mounted, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. We provide a summary on the ecological effects from mastication. We found that there were several studies on plant and soil impacts, but limited information on impacts to wildlife habitat. Although costs of mastication widely vary depending on machine size, the physical setting, size and configuration of pre-treatment biomass, and operator skill, mastication does have market and non-market benefits. Depending on the management objective, if mastication is an option, then a thorough site evaluation should consider slope, nonnative species invasions, vulnerability of soils to erode or compact, and treatment costs.
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The global demand for restoration has increased orders of magnitude in the last decade, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of native seed are required to feed this restoration engine. But where are all the seeds required by restoration going to come from? Wild seed resources continue to be depleted by habitat loss, land degradation and climatic change, and over-collection of seed from wild populations threatens to erode these resources further. Ethical seed sourcing for restoration now represents a core issue in responsible restoration practice. Solutions include the introduction of regulatory frameworks controlling seed sourcing from wild populations, the development of seed farming capacity and advancement of seed enhancement technologies and precision delivery systems reducing seed wastage.
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The Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service’s “Eastside Restoration Strategy” aimed to improve forest health conditions by accelerating the pace and scale of restoration on national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington. As part of this effort, the Regional Office created a dedicated interdisciplinary Blue Mountains Restoration Strategy Team (ID Team) to conduct landscape-level planning across four national forests and innovate strategies to more effectively reach planning decisions. We conducted interviews with 25 key informants, observed meetings, analyzed documents, and worked with an advisory group to understand transferrable insights from the project.
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The WUI is often synonymous with fire risk to buildings, but this research suggests that this is not the case in all fire-prone states. While fire outreach was often present near areas where buildings are destroyed by wildfire, many communities are established after major fires.
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These results highlight a high sensitivity of statistical projections to changing threshold relationships and data uncertainty, implying that projections of future ecosystem change in threshold‐governed ecosystems will be accompanied by notable uncertainty. This work also suggests that ecological responses to climate change will exhibit high spatio‐temporal variability as different regions approach and surpass climatic thresholds over the 21st century.