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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 report outlines a range-wide strategy for maintaining whitebark pine populations in high mountain areas based on the most current knowledge of the efficacy of techniques and differences in their application across communities. The strategy is written as a general guide for planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating fine-scale restoration activities for whitebark pine by public land management agencies, and to encourage agency and inter-agency coordination for greater efficiency. The strategy is organized into six scales of implementation, and each scale is described by assessment factors, restoration techniques, management concerns, and examples.
Webinar recording.
In this LANDFIRE Office Hour, Kim Ernstrom, and Wendy Detwiler, Wildland Fire Management RD&A, Technical Leads IFTDSS (and Josh Hyde: Tech Transfer Specialist, University of Idaho) discuss the basics of using IFTDSS for fuels planning. We also discuss practical examples of how IFTDSS is being used in the field.
Webinar recording.
The complex interactions between atmospheric and fire-induced winds are a persistent obstacle to accurately predicting wildfire front behavior. There are a multitude of wildfire spread models, with one primary distinction being the level of fire-atmosphere coupling in each. Coupling of fire-induced winds and ambient winds in numerical models is carried out through linking the heat and mass fluxes from the wildfire with the surface energy fluxes in the atmospheric model. The challenge in this coupling is increased with the introduction of heterogenous surface conditions, e.g., terrain, canopies, buildings. To better understand the dynamic coupling of fire-induced winds and atmospheric winds at microscales, the fast-response wildfire model QES-Fire was used to study the effects of fire-induced winds near structures, and the relative importance of the momentum deficits caused by canopies and structures on fire-induced winds.
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This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of advancements developed while extending the theory to promote collective action for wildfire. Extensions of Wilkinson’s work include organizing a range of adaptive capacity characteristics that help document differential community capacity for wildfire adaptation, introduction of “community archetypes” that reflect patterns of key adaptive capacity characteristics across cases, and development of fire adaptation “pathways” – combinations of policies, actions, and programs tailored to a range of community conditions.
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Shifts from longer seasonal snowpacks to shorter, ephemeral snowpacks (snowpacks that persist for <60 days) due to climate change will alter the timing and rates of water availability. Ephemeral snowmelt has less predictable timing and lowers soil water availability during the growing season. The Great Basin, United States is an ideal system to study snow ephemerality across a broad climate gradient. To identify the climatic controls on snow ephemerality, we analysed moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow‐covered products from water years 2001–2015 using an object‐based mapping approach and a random forest model. Winter temperature and precipitation were the most influential variables on the maximum snow duration. We predict that warming the average winter air temperature by 2 and 4°C would reduce the areal extent of seasonal snow by 14.7 and 47.8%, respectively (8.8% of the Great Basin’s areal extent is seasonal in the historical record), with shifts to ephemeral snowpack concentrated in lower elevations and warmer regions. The combination of warming and interannual precipitation variability (i.e., reductions of 25%) had different effects on vegetation types. Vegetation types that have had consistent seasonal snow cover in their historical record are likely to have lower resilience to a new hydrologic regime, with earlier and more intermittent snowmelt causing a longer but drier growing season. Implications of increased snow ephemerality on vegetation productivity and susceptibility to disturbance will depend on local topography, subsurface water storage, and physiological adaptations. Nevertheless, patterns found in this study can help target management intervention to species that are most at risk.
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Becoming a fire-adapted community that can live with wildfire is envisioned as a continuous, iterative process of adaptation. Miranda Mockrin, a research scientist with the Forest Service combined national and case study research to examine how experience with wildfire alters the built environment and community- and government-level wildfire mitigation, planning, and regulations. Research suggests that adaptation to wildfire through WUI regulations depends on multiple factors, including past experience with fire and the geographic extent and scale of the fire event relative to the local community and its government. While communities did not often pursue changes in WUI regulations, experience with wildfire was frequently cited as the impetus for other adaptive responses, such as improving emergency response or fire suppression, and expanding education and interaction with homeowners, such as Firewise programs or government support for fuel mitigation on private lands.
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A Southern Fire Exchange webinar with John Weir of Oklahoma State University and the Oklahoma Prescribed Burn Association. Are you involved in creating, developing, guiding, or supporting a prescribed burn association (PBA)? Are you interested learning how prescribed burn associations work or how they’re successfully sustained? Led by national PBA expert John Weir and supported by other PBA leaders, this webinar discussed a range of common questions faced by PBA organizers and organizations. The webinar started with a short overview of prescribed burn associations, their existing locations, structure and organization. After that introduction, the webinar opened up into an extended question and answer period to address some of the most common issues that come up in PBA development and maintenance.