Human Dimensions of Fire
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Efforts to understand, assess, and address diversifying recovery needs have growing relevance as wildfires continue to impact communities. However, little is known about social experiences navigating gaps in assistance funding and support or “unmet needs” in post-fire spaces, particularly for indirect impacts like smoke damage. Determining how affected residents access available information and make decisions related to unmet needs can aid the development of resources and programs that support rapid identification of, and response to, emergent or undocumented impacts during recovery processes. This study explores household experiences with smoke damage as an unmet need during recovery following the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, USA. Semi-structured interviews with residents and professionals who dealt with smoke damage revealed a wide spectrum of impacts. Decisions to act on smoke damage were influenced by risk perceptions and personal capacity to undertake self-guided recovery in the absence of a formalized process for navigating remediation. These experiences underscored a distinct absence of scientific and management expertise, legal protections or standards, and assistance related to smoke damage identification and remediation, catalyzing distrust in officials and ambiguity regarding whether smoke damaged homes could become safe again. Together, these conditions created cascading uncertainties for residents with smoke damaged homes that motivated long-term health concerns. Unmet needs after wildfire appeared to emerge because of misconceptions about impact severity, limited professional capacity, and adherence to rigid recovery structures that restrict professionals’ ability to identify and incorporate non-traditional impacts into existing processes. Findings informed suggestions for improving smoke damage recovery processes, inviting consideration of policy and more inclusive assistance to support recovery from indirect wildfire impacts.
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From 1992 to 2024, in all 8 contiguous-US Forest Service regions combined, wildfire-ignition density was lowest in designated wilderness areas (1.75 fires/1000 hectares), followed closely by Inventoried Roadless Areas (1.97 fires/1000 ha). The highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands within 50 m of roads (7.99 fires/1000 ha), and the second highest wildfire-ignition density was in other national forest lands outside of the 50-m road buffers but not in wilderness or roadless areas (3.50 fires/1000 ha). For human-caused, natural, and undetermined fires, wildfire-ignition density decreased as distance to road increased, irrespective of designation categories such as “wilderness” or “roadless.” In lands between 0 and 250 m from roads, 6 fires ignited per 1000 ha, whereas fewer than 2 fires ignited per 1000 ha at a distance class of over 2000 m from roads. Mean fire size varied by where the fire started: it was greatest in wilderness areas (239 ha), followed by Inventoried Roadless Areas (135 ha), roaded national forest lands outside of Inventoried Roadless Areas, wilderness, and the 50-m buffer (62 ha), and lands within the 50-m road buffer (49 ha). We found, however, that the largest 2% of fires had similar mean sizes and ignition densities regardless of where they started.
Webinar registration.
This is a webinar presented by Forest Service Research and Development, organized by the Rocky Mountain Research Station. It is one of five webinar sessions in a series about Fire Science You Can Use. This webinar event will include the following presentations:
“Fueling Adaptations: Wildfire Governance and Community Adaptations in Fire-Prone Landscapes of the Western U.S.” presented by Miranda Mockrin, Research Scientist, and Lindsay Campbell, Research Social Scientist
“Analyzing Social Media Comments: Case Studies from Two Wildfire Events” presented by Erin Belval, Research Forester/Economist
Webinar registration.
This is a webinar presented by Forest Service Research and Development, organized by the Rocky Mountain Research Station. It is one of five webinar sessions in a series about Fire Science You Can Use. This webinar event will include the following presentations:
“GeoLCES: Geospatial Support for Evaluating Wildland Firefighter Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes, and Safety Zones” presented by Dan Jimenez, Research Engineer
“Containment Lines, Fuel Breaks, PODs, and Suppression Success: A Case Study of the 2021 Schneider Springs Fire” presented by Jesse Young, Research Economist/Forester
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This study investigates the key drivers influencing prescribed fire effects across 16 sites in northern and central California, with particular emphasis on how operational decisions by fire practitioners shape burn outcomes. Data from the California Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program revealed that prescribed fires reduced total fuel loads by an average of 60 %, with greater consumption of postfrontal smoldering fuels (coarse fuels, 65 %) compared to frontline spreading fuels (fine fuels, 49.0 %).
Crown scorch height showed a strong relationship to crown base height (R2 = 0.37–0.86), suggesting that practitioners use crown base height as a visual indicator to control fireline intensity and avoid crown damage. This relationship may partially explain fuel consumption patterns, as crown avoidance strategies can influence fire behavior and intensity. Additionally, we documented a compensatory relationship between live and dead fuel moisture content across burn seasons, indicating that practitioners strategically select burning windows that maintain fireline intensity within controllable parameters regardless of season.
Our findings demonstrate that human decisions fundamentally modify prescribed fire behavior to maintain safety parameters, often constraining outcomes to conservative ranges that may compromise treatment effectiveness. Understanding and accounting for these human factors is crucial to encouraging a more effective use of prescribed fires in the future. We recommend that future research explicitly include operational parameters and practitioner decision-making processes in assessing prescribed fire science, balancing safety considerations with goals for ecological restoration.
Workshop website.
As new fire policies and adaptation strategies have grown across the Northwest, it is essential that we work together to learn, share and craft actionable visions. ADAPTING TOGETHER focuses on diverse approaches to place-based wildfire adaptation within and across this region.
By bringing people together from diverse sectors, geographies, and cultures, we will delve into the following questions:
What kinds of place-based adaptation are happening around the broader Northwest, and what capacity and resources do they require?
How do we maintain and grow a focus on fire’s ecological and cultural roles while protecting communities?
What kinds of local partnerships, economic strategies and policies will help us become more fire-adapted?
In the next five and ten years, who needs to work together and how so that we can collectively coexist with fire?
Fire adaptation is a big puzzle with many pieces. This workshop explores these questions through selected topics to offer reframings, new conversations, creative ideas and meaningful connections.
Participants will…
Share their personal experiences, perspectives, and ideas on the workshop’s themes and guiding questions.
Build relationships, learn with peers, and leave with new connections.
Contribute to fire adaptation practice in the region by visioning the future of how we live with wildfire.
The workshop begins at 1:30 p.m. on March 4th and ends around noon on March 6th. Expect a mix of panels, learning circles, case studies, interactive activities and informal time to connect.
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Join community leaders and wildfire partners from across Nevada and beyond for the 2026 Fire Adapted Nevada Summit, a two-day event dedicated to advancing wildfire resilience through collaboration, innovation, and action.
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Since the late 1800s, the US government has largely removed Indigenous fire stewardship practices from the landscape by implementing a top-down fire suppression system that criminalized traditional fire practices and denaturalized the role of fire in forested environments. A century of routine fire suppression produced dense, homogenous forests capable of sustaining high-intensity wildfire that exceeds the suppression capabilities of land management organizations in many regions, spurring federal leaders to modify management approaches. As part of this change, numerous federal policies and plans have advocated for further involvement of Native American tribes and incorporation of Indigenous knowledge within management decisions. These initiatives represent opportunities to simultaneously expand tribal burning rights and reduce wildfire risk, but imbalanced power dynamics stemming from the historic and ongoing colonization of tribal nations continue to limit successful collaboration. The nature of these power imbalances is multifaceted, and this paper interrogates the ideological forces that uphold the settler-colonial relationship. We conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the discourses and frames used by tribal and non-tribal wildfire protection plans (WPPs), noting how different narratives are used to reinforce or contest common perceptions of wildfire and, more broadly, the legitimacy of a fire management system built on wildfire suppression and anti-Indigenous ideologies.
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In the face of increased complexity, the USDA Forest Service (Forest Service) is emphasizing the use of risk-based spatial analytics and expert coaching of fire managers through consistent processes and practices to inform safer, effective, and strategic decision-making during incident management. The Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) integrates collaborative dialogue with risk management assistance (RMA) and other spatial analytics to develop and deploy a consistent, science-based strategic planning model for incident management. An important challenge is understanding the impact of frameworks like the ISAP to track their efficacy over time and their impact on approaches to incident management. Using concepts from the implementation of innovation literature, we investigated the following questions: (1) What is the perceived value of the ISAP according to line officers and incident managers who have used it? and (2) What factors affected the adoption and use of the ISAP at different system levels (i.e., individual, organizational, and cultural)? We examined three case studies: the 2023 Elkhorn Fire (Case 1), San Juan fires (Quartz Ridge, Bear Creek, Mosca fires; Case 2), and the Six Rivers Forest Lightning (SRF) Complex (Case 3), utilizing participant observation and 30 semi-structured interviews with key informants.
Webinar recording (57:57)
The size and frequency of human-caused large wildfires continues to increase across the U.S. Southwest due to an array of evolving social and ecological conditions. Evidence-based prevention strategies are urgently needed, but foundational research that bridges geospatial and social data to inform these efforts is scarce. Achieving a substantial reduction in human-caused large wildfires also requires effective science-management partnerships that promote interventions grounded in best available science. In this webinar, speakers present an assortment of interconnected studies across Arizona and New Mexico that were developed in partnership with federal, state, and local prevention staff to address these needs. This includes key findings from GIS analyses, surveys, interviews, and focus groups with community members and practitioners that highlight existing successes and opportunities to strengthen human-caused wildfire prevention moving forward.
Presenters: Catrin Edgeley, Assistant Professor, Utah State University; Zander Evans, Executive Director, Forest Stewards Guild; Sarah Devenport, Human Dimensions Specialist, Ecological Restoration Institute; Gabe Kohler, Renew Forest Works LLC