Fire Communication & Education
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In 1998, the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) was statutorily authorized as a joint partnership between the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest
Service. The program provides leadership to the wildland fire science community by identifying high-priority fire science research needs that will enhance the decisionmaking ability of
managers to meet their objectives. This publication celebrates and describes the JFSP’s contributions to and impact on the wildland fire community over the past 20 years.
FireWorks is an educational program about the science of wildland fire, designed for students in grades K-12. Educator workshops are offered each year to teach educators, community leaders, and agency communicators how to use FireWorks. Two research projects have shown that FireWorks increases student and adult understanding of wildland fire.
FireWorks provides students with interactive, hands-on materials to study wildland fire. It is highly interdisciplinary and students learn about properties of matter, chemical and physical processes, ecosystem fluctuations and cycles, habitat and survival, and human interactions with ecosystems. Students using FireWorks ask questions, gather information, analyze and interpret it, and communicate their discoveries.
Exploring the influence of local social context on strategies for achieving fire adapted communities
This study evaluated 19 interactive focus groups across five communities spanning five Western US states using a mixed-method design that allowed for the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicate a number of significant differences in effectiveness ratings for adaptation approaches across communities, including requirement of vegetation mitigations on private properties, fostering Firewise communities, and zoning efforts in fire-prone areas. We used qualitative data to help explain the differences between communities as a function of unique local social context operating in each location. We also compare our results with existing frameworks promoting community “archetypes” to evaluate their continued use in wildfire management planning or response.
Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) has proved difficult to implement successfully. Insufficient attention to the problem definition process contributes to disappointing outcomes because that step sets the problem-solving approach and the attitudes of key partners. The exploratory problem assessment (EA) approach is a practical and cost-effective way for CAM project managers to learn enough about a problem situation quickly enough to identify critical partners and incorporate their input into problem definition and project planning. EA is a facilitated conceptual modeling approach built around two basic ideas: knowledge-focused facilitation can improve the problem definition process, and information design concepts can assist in building common understandings of complex situations. A facilitator with knowledge-brokering skills gathers and integrates information from people with diverse experiential and technical knowledge of the problem situation. The results are presented as information-rich and readily understandable diagrammatic conceptual models that can function as change theories for project planning. The EA approach and visual design strategy are described, with two illustrative cases showing how the approach can be applied in practice.
This report provides a framework for assessing cross-boundary wildfire exposure and a case study application in the western US. The case study provides detailed mapping and tabular decision support materials for prioritizing fuel management investments aimed at reducing wildfire exposure to communities located proximal to national forests. We used national FSim simulation outputs to (1) estimate cross-boundary wildfire among major land types (Federal, State, private); (2) quantify structure exposure to all western communities; (3) map sources of community wildfire exposure (firesheds); (4) characterize firesheds in terms of management opportunity and fuels; and (5) prioritize communities based on integration of exposure and fireshed characteristics.
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New fire management paradigms are emerging that recognize fire is inevitable, and in many cases desirable. During this webinar you will be introduced to a new process for spatial fire planning using tools such as Potential Control Line atlases (PCLs), Quantitative wildfire Risk Assessments (QRAs), and Suppression Difficulty Index (SDI). Chris Dunn, Oregon State Univ, will demonstrate how these tools can align wildfire management decisions and actions, from the development of strategic wildfire response zones to in situ wildfire response decisions that balance operational success, firefighter safety and values at risk.
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In this paper, we present 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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This study found that emergency managers exhibit some of the same decision biases, sensitivity to framing, and heuristics found in studies of the general public, even when making decisions in their area of expertise. A national survey of county-level emergency managers finds that managers appear more risk averse when the outcomes of actions are framed as gains than when equivalent outcomes are framed as losses, a finding that is consistent with prospect theory. The study also found that the perceived actions of emergency managers in neighboring jurisdictions affect the choices a manager makes. In addition, our managers show evidence of attribution bias, outcome bias, and difficulties processing numerical information, particularly probabilities compared to frequencies. Each of these departures from perfect rationality points to potential shortfalls in public managers’ decision making. There are opportunities to improve decision making through reframing problems, providing training in structured decision-making processes, and employing different choice architectures to nudge behavior in a beneficial direction
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This study used focus groups with local officials and residents in McCall, Idaho, to better understand their application for formal, city-wide recognition from the Firewise program. Results indicate the importance of early public involvement in adaptation of wildfire mitigation programs because many local residents indicated confusion over what Firewise recognition meant for them. Both professionals and residents thought Firewise could improve local capacity to address risk but also identified critical needs for adapting the program, including concerns about impacts to area aesthetics, differences between seasonal and full-time residents, and support for locally based organization rather than federal or state government organization that could infringe on personal freedoms.
This interactive webinar will explore how systems level trends impact the way we manage fire in unexpected ways. Hear why cutting trees in overstocked forests does far less than you might think to increase a community’s resilience to catastrophic fire; how the public framing of the “wildfire crisis” creates narratives that negatively impacts fire management; and how the unintended consequences of policy and demographics muzzle the most important ecological disturbance in almost 80% of America’s landscapes. The webinar will address both opinions and opportunities for re-creation of a restoration economy and fire’s New Deal.