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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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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.
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Using biophysical predictors and patterns of burn severity from 1180 recent fire events, we mapped the locations of potential fire refugia across upland conifer forests in the southwestern United States (US) (99,428 km2 of forest area), a region that is highly vulnerable to fire-driven transformation. We found that low pre-fire forest cover, flat slopes or topographic concavities, moderate weather conditions, spring-season burning, and areas affected by low-to moderate-severity fire within the previous 15 years were most-commonly associated with refugia. Based on current (i.e., 2021) conditions, we predicted that 67.6% and 18.1% of conifer forests in our study area would contain refugia under moderate and extreme fire weather, respectively. However, potential refugia were 36.4% (moderate weather) and 31.2% (extreme weather) more common across forests that experienced recent fires, supporting the increased use of prescribed and resource objective fires during moderate weather conditions to promote fire-resistant landscapes. When overlaid with models of tree recruitment, 23.2% (moderate weather) and 6.4% (extreme weather) of forests were classified as refugia with a high potential to support post-fire recruitment in the surrounding landscape. These locations may be disproportionately valuable for ecosystem sustainability, providing habitat for fire-sensitive species and maintaining forest persistence in an increasingly fire-prone world.
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Here, we quantify observed and projected trends in the frequency and seasonality of western United States prescribed fire days. We find that while ~2 C of global warming by 2060 will reduce such days overall (−17%), particularly during spring (−25%) and summer (−31%), winter (+4%) may increasingly emerge as a comparatively favorable window for prescribed fire especially in northern states.
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Costs associated with the Schultz Fire continued to accrue over 10 years, particularly those associated with post-wildfire flooding, totalling between US$109 and US$114 million. Suppression costs represented only 10% of total costs.
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Sagebrush ecosystems of western North America are experiencing widespread loss and degradation by invasive annual grasses. Positive feedbacks between fire and annual grasses are often invoked to explain the rapid pace of these changes, yet annual grasses also appear capable of achieving dominance among vegetation communities that have not burned for many decades. Using a dynamic, remotely sensed vegetation dataset in tandem with remotely sensed fire perimeter and burn severity datasets, we examine the role of fire in transitions to and persistence of annual grass dominance in the U.S. Great Basin over the past 3 decades. Although annual grasses and wildfire are so tightly associated that one is rarely mentioned without the other, our findings reveal surprisingly widespread transformation of sagebrush ecosystems by invasive annual grasses in the absence of fire. These findings are discussed in the context of strategic management; we argue a pivot from predominantly reactive management (e.g., aggressive fire suppression and post-fire restoration in heavily-infested areas) to more proactive management (e.g., enhancing resistance and managing propagule pressure in minimally-invaded areas) is urgently needed to halt the loss of Great Basin sagebrush ecosystems.
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Native species that are abundant and persistent across disturbance-succession cycles can affect recovery and restoration of plant communities, especially in drylands. In the sagebrush-steppe deserts of North America, restoring deep-rooted perennial bunchgrasses (DRPBGs) is key to the strategy for breaking an increasingly problematic cycle of wildfire promoted by exotic annual grasses (EAGs) and displacement of perennials by post-fire increases in EAGs. We asked how Sandberg bluegrass (Poa secunda)—a common native grass that shares traits with EAGs such as resilience to disturbance and rapid, shallow-rooted, early season growth—(1) recovered after wildfire, (2) responded to different combinations of native-plant seedings of DRPBGs and EAG-targeting herbicides; and (3) in turn, related to DRPBG recovery.
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This study used geospatial seed transfer zones as our focal management areas. We broadly considered generalized provisional seed transfer zones, created using climate and stratified by ecoregion, but also present results for empirical seed transfer zones, based on species‐specific research, as part of our case study. Historic fire occurrence was effective for prioritizing seed transfer zones: 23 of 132 provisional seed transfer zones burned every year, and, within each ecoregion, two provisional seed transfer zones comprised ≧50% of the total area burned across all years. Fire occurrence within PACs largely reflected the seed transfer zone priorities found for the ecoregion as a whole. Our results demonstrate that historic disturbance can be used to identify regions that encounter regular or large disturbance. This information can then be used to guide seed production, purchase, and storage, create more certainty for growers and managers, and ultimately increase restoration success.
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Fuels, pre-fire weather, and topography were important predictors of burn severity, although predictor importance varied between fires. Post-fire debris-flow hazard rankings from predicted burn severity (pre-fire) were similar to hazard assessments based on observed burn severity (post-fire).
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Biophysical and social data collected at the property level are used to investigate whether practitioner defined “communities” within a contiguous geographic area are distinct in dimensions relevant to tailoring wildfire preparedness and mitigation education efforts. Specifically, we ask: How can local, community-specific social data inform wildfire education efforts across diverse communities? To answer this question, the research attends to the notion that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to fire adapted communities by investigating what (e.g., the messaging, the programs, the communication mode), if anything, about wildfire education efforts should be tailored to the local context?