Wildland Urban Interface
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ACES: A Community on Ecosystem Services represents a dynamic and growing international assembly of professionals, researchers, and policy-makers involved with ecosystem services. The ACES Conference provides an open forum to share experiences, methods, and tools for assessing and incorporating ecosystem services into public and private decisions.
The goal of the conference is to link state-of-the-art science, practice, and decision making by bringing together the ecosystem services community and decision makers from around the United States and the globe. ACES will engage leaders in government, NGOs, academia, Native American tribes, and the private sector to advance the use of ecosystem services science and practice in resource management and other societal decisions.
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Neighborhoods at Risk is an easy-to-use website with interactive maps, charts, and resources to help communities identify neighborhoods that may be especially vulnerable to wildfire, flooding, and extreme heat of climate change.
It is free to use and available for every community, county, and state in the nation.
Summit webpage.
Mark your calendars for the 2025 Fire Adapted Nevada Summit on March 17th and 18th at the Joe Crowley Student Union on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. The summit is your chance to kickstart or advance your fire adaptation journey in Nevada.
- Connect with other Fire Adapted Nevada (FAN) communities
- Engage with local, county, state, and federal fire agencies
- Discover grant opportunities and other resources to support your community’s fire adaptation efforts
Thanks to contributions from FAN partners, registration is FREE and includes materials and meals!
Conference webpage.
Join us December 4-6, 2024 in Tucson, Arizona for the AZ WUI Summit: Partnering to Build Wildfire Resilient Communities!
Presented by The AZ Wildfire Initiative, Northern Arizona University School of Forestry, and the Southwest Fire Science Consortium.
View synthesis.
Fire is an integral component of many Southwest ecosystems; however, fire regimes across the region have been affected by climate change, creating conditions to which these ecosystems have not adapted. Since 1980, fire frequency, size and severity have increased in many ecosystems in the western US due to changes in climate combined with a history of fire suppression and other forest management practices, such as grazing and logging…
…The goal of this synthesis is to provide a summary of the literature, published in 2023, on fire and fire-related topics
View video (15:11).
Development of Oregon’s draft statewide wildfire hazard and wildland-urban interface maps, by Andy McEvoy, Faculty Research Assistant at the Oregon State University College of Forestry.vid
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In the western United States, wildfire activity has increased the exposure of communities to fires that can devastate lives and destroy homes and businesses. As fires encroach on urban areas, protecting communities from wildfire impacts is a top priority for fire managers. Scientists studying wildland fire in the wildland urban interface (WUI) are particularly interested in using historical data and analytic models to understand how to reduce risks to the WUI.
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In this white paper, we assert that the current wildfire management approach has partially inverted the wildfire problem as one in which wildland fires encroach on communities when, in actuality, it is communities that have increasingly impinged on wildlands where fires might appropriately play an important ecological role. As a result, predominant strategies continue to apply shortsighted, risk-averse reactions emphasizing community protection at the expense of creating resilient landscapes and promoting safe and effective wildfire responses. In doing so, managers are inadvertently limiting agency ability to build fire-adapted communities and generate landscape vegetation and fire conditions that support more meaningful and useful change.
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We find that significant precursors for fire suppression resource deployment are location, fire weather, canopy cover, Wildland–Urban Interface category, and history of past fire. These results align partially with, but are distinct from, results of earlier research modelling expenditures related to suppression which include precursors such as total burned area which become observable only after an incident.
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For this webinar, we are joined by Dr. Andrew Merschel, Postdoctoral Scholar with ORISE and the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station and Dr. Chris Dunn, Assistant Professor at Oregon State University.
Dr. Andrew Merschel: The largest, tallest, and often the longest-lived species of nine conifer genera are found in temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Newly developed fire and tree establishment histories are challenging paradigms regarding how old-growth trees and forests developed their iconic structurally diversity and their tremendous biomass. This presentation will review annually precise reconstructions of fire and forest development history that reveal how low- to moderate-severity fire and Indigenous fire stewardship historically shaped old trees and forests.
Dr. Chris Dunn: In 2021, Oregon’s Legislature passed Senate Bill 762 requiring Oregon State University, in collaboration with Oregon Department of Forestry, to create a wildland-urban interface map coupled with a wildfire hazard map to narrow regulation of the home ignition zone to only those properties at high or extreme risk. Upon release, the public exploded with anger, fueled in part by misinformation and false-narratives, including threats of violence, leading to retraction of the map. In this talk I will discuss the difficulty of integrating science with policy, how the public responded, and lessons learned relevant to state and local government policy actions.