Fire Communication & Education
Webinar recording.
Description: In this webinar, Kira Hoffman will describe some of the factors that have contributed to the recent impactful wildfire seasons experienced in British Columbia in the last five years. She will discuss some of the barriers to applying controlled fire to the broader landbase and the importance of supporting Indigenous-led fire stewardship.
Presenter: Kira Hoffman is a fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter. Hoffman’s research focuses on how humans have used fire for millennia to manage and enhance their natural surroundings. In concert with Indigenous and local ecological knowledge, she uses western science to better understand how present-day forests have been shaped by stewardship techniques such as burning and how ongoing fire suppression has eroded the resiliency of landscapes and human communities. From field expeditions sampling fire-scarred trees to historical photograph interpretation and remote sensing imagery, her methods also integrate a range of disciplines including dendrochronology, botany, and archaeology. Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of British Columbia, she is passionate about linking knowledge to action through science communication and supporting Indigenous-led solutions to environmental problems.
Webinar recording.
Presenter: Sarah McCaffrey
Description: Fire management in the United States is currently facing numerous challenges. While many of these challenges involve questions about how to increase pace and scale of fuels treatments and adapt to longer, sometimes year-round, fire seasons and more frequent extreme fires, there is also a need to adapt wildfire communication efforts to changing fire management needs and practices. This presentation will discuss insights from two decades of fire social science research about a range of topics to consider in improving wildfire communication including issues with conflation of language (prevention is not mitigation), when more rather than less complex explanations may be merited, and the need to account for how fire fits in everyday lives. The presentation will draw from general Communication, Natural Hazards, and Risk Communication theory, as well as specific fire social science research findings, about topics and approaches that are more or less likely to resonate with the public.
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.
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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