Fire Communication & Education
Webinar recording.
Over the past decade, government policies and programs to incentivize “all-lands approaches” to reducing wildfire risk have emerged that call for collective action among diverse public, private, and Tribal landowners who share fire-prone landscapes. This presentation draws on research from Oregon and California to offer insights into what collective action looks like, when it is desirable, and how to promote it to increase the resilience of fire-prone forests.
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Land management and fire management goals are increasingly framed in terms of resilience, in part due to the combined impacts of climate change, land-use change, and legacies of land management. Implicit in this framing is the recognition that resilience to wildfire involves both ecological and social dimensions. Discussions surrounding resilience often do not explicitly articulate what resources should or must be resilient to wildfire, and seldom do they make explicit for whom resilience is important. Land managers need to understand and identify which resources their communities want to be resilient to wildfire before they can outline specific actions that could be taken to support resilience for those resources. We detail an approach for bringing together land and resource managers, community institutions, and other stakeholders—those people for whom resilience is important—to achieve these objectives. We describe a series of exercises used for a workshop but present them here in a more generic form that could be adapted to a variety of landscapes, audiences, and formats.
Webinar join links and recordings.
11-week lecture series Lookout: Envisioning Futures with Wildfire, we’ll scan the horizon for the ideas and stories that can guide us through this critical and disorienting time. We’ve invited speakers who offer perspectives from across the arts, humanities, and environmental sciences to think about questions like: What can we learn about transformation from fire’s destructive and creative force? How should we live differently, both with each other and on the planet, in this era of wildfires? How can we honor fire as an ancient, rejuvenating element while also honoring all that has been lost to wildfire?
This series is hosted by the Spring Creek Project and the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative at Oregon State University and co-sponsored by OSU’s Center for the Humanities, OSU’s Sustainability Office, OSU’s Arts and Education Complex, and Terrain.org. Additional co-sponsors for individual talks are noted in the schedule below.
The talks in the series will be broadcast live on Zoom Tuesdays at 6 p.m. PST / 8 p.m. CST / 9 p.m. EST from January 4 to March 15. Free and open to everyone.
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The case study research presented in this article evaluates social characteristics present in a WUI community that faces extreme wildfire risk to both people and property. It explores social processes that impede the ability of community members to work together collectively to solve problems (e.g., wildfire risk) and offers an alternative perspective about the nature of residency status (i.e., full-time and non-full-time) and its role in influencing wildfire mitigation efforts.
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Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other collaborative governance regimes (CGRs). We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our analysis is informed by a synthesis of the literature, case examples and exemplars from focus groups, and a national CFLRP survey.
Webinar recording.
The 2020 Cameron Peak Fire burned more than 200,000 acres of public and private land in northern Colorado making it the largest fire recorded in Colorado’s history. Extreme fire behavior driven by dense and dry fuels, steep terrain, and weather and climatic factors greatly affected the range of potential management strategies. Many different communities were affected by the fire from smoke, repeated and long-term evacuations, emotional distress, and property impacts. Social science researchers at Colorado State University, in conjunction with the USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station, interviewed more than 50 landowners and residents in communities directly impacted by the Cameron Peak Fire to understand and share their experiences and perspectives. Join this webinar to learn about people’s attitudes on the communication and fire management strategies, their perceptions of post-fire landscape recovery and forest health, and their support for future forest and fire management.
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The effect of providing parcel-specific information depends on baseline conditions: Informing homeowners about their property’s wildfire risk increases information-seeking among homeowners of the highest-risk parcels by about 5 percentage points and reduces information-seeking among homeowners of lower-risk parcels by about 6 percentage points. Parcel-specific information also increases the overall response in the lowest risk communities by more than 10 percentage points.
Webinar recording.
Overview: This presentation will share key findings from a recent Joint Fire Science Project, specifically on: 1) the multiple types of boundaries in managing wildfire risk, and the boundary spanning features that can help cross them; 2) what strategies actors utilized for wildfire risk reduction across five case studies in the West; and 3) questions and ideas for future research and practice. This work is intended to help wildfire practitioners and managers better understand and address these organizational complexities as they work toward greater collective impact.
Presenters: Heidi Huber-Stearns, University of Oregon; Emily Jane Davis, Oregon State University; Tony Cheng, Colorado State University
Webinar recording.
During this peer learning session attendees will learn about impactful partnerships at the local, regional, and national level, including:
- The partnership between the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation and the NFF’s role as a Congressional chartered nonprofit;
- Partnerships between the Forest Service and nonprofits at the regional level and the role of the regional partnership coordinator in supporting these relationships;
- Partnerships with local friends groups as given in an example by the Friends of the Bridger-Teton; and
- Have an opportunity to ask questions of the speakers
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In this study, we used wildfire simulations and building location data to evaluate community wildfire exposure and identify plausible disasters that are not based on typical mean-based statistical approaches. We compared the location and magnitude of simulated disasters to historical disasters (1984–2020) in order to characterize plausible surprises which could inform future wildfire risk reduction planning. Results indicate that nearly half of communities are vulnerable to a future disaster, that the magnitude of plausible disasters exceeds any recent historical events, and that ignitions on private land are most likely to result in very high community exposure. Our methods, in combination with more typical actuarial characterizations, provide a way to support investment in and communication with communities exposed to low-probability, high-consequence wildfires.