Fire Communication & Education
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After a catastrophic wildfire, quick action must be taken to minimize social, environmental, and economic devastation. Responsive action requires navigating a complex maze of diverse landowners, community organizations, and numerous local and federal requirements.
Given enough time, forests eventually heal from wildfire. But that healing process can take decades, or even centuries. They simply won’t heal quickly without human intervention. Timely rehabilitation efforts reduce environmental impacts of fire, and can have a positive impact on the community’s social and economic situation in the months and years after the fire. Perhaps most importantly, quick and effective rehabilitation efforts improve public health and safety.
Access InciWeb.
InciWeb is an interagency all-risk incident information management system. The system was developed with two primary missions:
- Provide the public a single source of incident related information
- Provide a standardized reporting tool for the Public Affairs community
A number of supporting systems automate the delivery of incident information to remote sources. This ensures that the information regarding active incidents is consistent, and the delivery is timely.
Video showcasing new features of this tool.
Access OR Explorer.
The Oregon Wildfire Risk Explorer is designed to increase wildfire awareness, give a comprehensive view of wildfire risk and local fire history, and educate users about wildfire prevention and mitigation resources. The site provides decision support for homeowners, communities, and professionals to identify and prioritize local fire prevention and mitigation efforts.
Access CCAST dashboard.
CCAST is an online library of conservation case studies. Through the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative, conservation partners in the southwestern US and northern Mexico identified the need to create an inventory of case studies on management actions, partnership and collaboration, monitoring, and adaptive management. Sharing lessons learned through case studies can inform management practices by facilitating communication and learning in the conservation community.
With funding support from the USDA Southwest Climate Hub, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Forest Service are partnering to launch CCAST to share case studies on a new online platform. The goal of this effort is to develop a user-friendly “management toolbox” to inform achievable on-the-ground actions that will help meet conservation goals.
See also the CCAST storymap and case study tag-based search.
View webinar recording.
How could have so many homes and businesses burned so quickly in the Wine Country Fires? While the landscape can be the fuse, the homes really can be the most burnable part of the landscape. For this webinar we’ll talk about key lesson that can be learned from these northern California fires and how we can help our homes and landscapes to become more resilient to wildfires. This webinar will bring forward information about fire preparedness, building design, construction and maintenance in with an emphasis identifying and managing the fuels near our homes (e.g. combustible wood mulches used in landscaping, lawn furniture, leaf accumulations, dry landscape plants, etc.), especially in the 5 feet immediately adjacent to our homes.
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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.
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This article extends an existing approach by articulating how characteristic patterns of local social context might be used to generate a range of fire adaptation “pathways” that can be applied variably across communities. Each ‘pathway’ would specify a distinct combination of actions, potential policies and incentives that best reflect the social dynamics, ecological stressors, and accepted institutional functions that people in diverse communities are likely to enact. We contend that advancement of the conceptual tools introduced in this article can aid communities in the development of flexible, scenario- based approaches for addressing wildfire adaptation in different situations. Processes outlined in the article also serve as a unifying way to document, test, and advance flexible approaches professionals can use to work with local populations in the co-development of wildfire management strategies.
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The goal of this paper is to go beyond drawing on distinct disciplinary perspectives to develop a holistic view of extreme wildfire event (EWE) as a social-ecological phenomenon. Based on literature review and using a transdisciplinary approach, this paper proposes a definition of EWE as a process and an outcome. Considering the lack of a consistent “scale of gravity” to leverage extreme wildfire events such as in natural hazards (e.g., tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes) we present a proposal of wildfire classification with seven categories based on measurable fire spread and behavior parameters and suppression difficulty.
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This study involved a statewide survey of participants in Oregon forest collaboratives to examine differences in motivations, perceptions of success, and satisfaction among Forest Service participants (“agency participants”), who made up 31% of the sample, and other respondents (“non-agency”) who represent nonfederal agencies, interest groups, citizens, and non-governmental groups. This study found that agency participants differed from non-agency participants. They typically had higher annual incomes, and were primarily motivated to participate to build trust. However, a majority of all respondents were similar in not indicating any other social or economic motivations as their primary reason for collaborating. A majority also reported satisfaction with their collaborative— despite not ranking collaborative performance on a number of specific potential outcomes highly. Together, this suggests that collaboration in Oregon is currently perceived as successful despite not achieving many specific outcomes.
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The WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million; 41% growth) and land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 km2; 33% growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States. The vast majority of new WUI areas were the result of new housing (97%), not related to an increase in wildland vegetation. Within the perimeter of recent wildfires (1990–2015), there were 286,000 houses in 2010, compared with 177,000 in 1990. Furthermore, WUI growth often results in more wildfire ignitions, putting more lives and houses at risk. Wildfire problems will not abate if recent housing growth trends continue.