Adapting to the growing frequency of catastrophic wildfires in Greece and mitigating their effects is a complex socio-ecological problem. We used an online survey to query more than 100 engaged ...stakeholders who can potentially influence possible legislation and fire management organizational reform, emphasizing civil protection agencies and research entities. We focused the questionnaire on the importance of different wildfire effects to understand which were considered negative or unacceptable, indifferent, or positive. For fire prevention, we examined the range of acceptance and views on fuel management and fire use activities that are limited in extent or not allowed in Greece. We also examined the beliefs regarding ignition causes and responsibility, in addition to how different policies might reduce wildfire-related problems. The results revealed an emphasis on reforming wildfire management policies to deal with the way society and agencies function and interact, and mitigate the influence of climate change in wildfire frequency and behavior. In addition, respondents had a negative stance towards allowing wildfires to burn for resource objectives and a strong belief that arsonists are behind most ignitions. They also believe the lack of a national cadaster system is a major source of wildfire-related problems. The results indicate little support for fuel treatments, but increased acceptance for the legalization of fire use during firefighting (backfires). This study summarizes current wildfire perceptions in Greece and identifies opportunities and barriers to changes in wildfire governance to improve risk management programs and guide post-fire management and mitigation.
Natural disturbances including wildfire, insects and disease are a growing threat to the remaining late successional forests in the Pacific Northwest, USA. These forests are a cornerstone of the ...region's ecological diversity and provide essential habitat to a number of rare terrestrial and aquatic species including the endangered northern spotted owl (
Strix occidentalis caurina). Wildfires in particular have reduced the amount of late successional forests over the past decade, prompting land managers to expand investments in forest management in an attempt to slow losses and mitigate wildfire risk. Much of the emphasis is focused specifically on late successional reserves established under the Northwest Forest Plan to provide habitat for spotted owls. In this paper, we demonstrate a probabilistic risk analysis system for quantifying wildfire threats to spotted owl habitat and comparing the efficacy of fuel treatment scenarios. We used wildfire simulation methods to calculate spatially explicit probabilities of habitat loss for fuel treatment scenarios on a 70,245
ha study area in Central Oregon, USA. We simulated 1000 wildfires with randomly located ignitions and weather conditions that replicated a recent large fire within the study area. A flame length threshold for each spotted owl habitat stand was determined using the forest vegetation simulator and used to predict the proportion of fires that resulted in habitat loss. Wildfire modeling revealed a strong spatial pattern in burn probability created by natural fuel breaks (lakes and lava flows). We observed a non-linear decrease in the probability of habitat loss with increasing treatment area. Fuels treatments on a relatively minor percentage of the forested landscape (20%) resulted in a 44% decrease in the probability of spotted owl habitat loss averaged over all habitat stands. The modeling system advances the application of quantitative and probabilistic risk assessment for habitat and species conservation planning.
Fire-prone landscapes present many challenges for both managers and policy makers in developing adaptive behaviors and institutions. We used a coupled human and natural systems framework and an ...agent-based landscape model to examine how alternative management scenarios affect fire and ecosystem services metrics in a fire-prone multiownership landscape in the eastern Cascades of Oregon. Our model incorporated existing models of vegetation succession and fire spread and information from original empirical studies of landowner decision making. Our findings indicate that alternative management strategies can have variable effects on landscape outcomes over 50 years for fire, socioeconomic, and ecosystem services metrics. For example, scenarios with federal restoration treatments had slightly less high-severity fire than a scenario without treatment; exposure of homes in the wildland-urban interface to fire was also slightly less with restoration treatments compared to no management. Treatments appeared to be more effective at reducing high-severity fire in years with more fire than in years with less fire. Under the current management scenario, timber production could be maintained for at least 50 years on federal lands. Under an accelerated restoration scenario, timber production fell because of a shortage of areas meeting current stand structure treatment targets. Trade-offs between restoration outcomes (e.g., open forests with large fire-resistant trees) and habitat for species that require dense older forests were evident. For example, the proportional area of nesting habitat for northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) was somewhat less after 50 years under the restoration scenarios than under no management. However, the amount of resilient older forest structure and habitat for white-headed woodpecker (Leuconotopicus albolarvatus) was higher after 50 years under active management. More carbon was stored on this landscape without management than with management, despite the occurrence of high-severity wildfire. Our results and further applications of the model could be used in collaborative settings to facilitate discussion and development of policies and practices for fire-prone landscapes.
Wildland fire suppression practices in the western United States are being widely scrutinized by policymakers and scientists as costs escalate and large fires increasingly affect social and ...ecological values. One potential solution is to change current fire suppression tactics to intentionally increase the area burned under conditions when risks are acceptable to managers and fires can be used to achieve long-term restoration goals in fire adapted forests. We conducted experiments with the Envision landscape model to simulate increased levels of wildfire over a 50-year period on a 1.2 million ha landscape in the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA. We hypothesized that at some level of burned area fuels would limit the growth of new fires, and fire effects on the composition and structure of forests would eventually reduce future fire intensity and severity. We found that doubling current rates of wildfire resulted in detectable feedbacks in area burned and fire intensity. Area burned in a given simulation year was reduced about 18% per unit area burned in the prior five years averaged across all scenarios. The reduction in area burned was accompanied by substantially lower fire severity, and vegetation shifted to open forest and grass-shrub conditions at the expense of old growth habitat. Negative fire feedbacks were slightly moderated by longer-term positive feedbacks, in which the effect of prior area burned diminished during the simulation. We discuss trade-offs between managing fuels with wildfire versus prescribed fire and mechanical fuel treatments from a social and policy standpoint. The study provides a useful modeling framework to consider the potential value of fire feedbacks as part of overall land management strategies to build fire resilient landscapes and reduce wildfire risk to communities in the western U.S. The results are also relevant to prior climate-wildfire studies that did not consider fire feedbacks in projections of future wildfire activity.
Policymakers seek ways to encourage fuel reduction among private forest landowners to augment similar efforts on federal and state lands. Motivating landowners to contribute to landscape-level ...wildfire protection requires an understanding of factors that underlie landowner behaviour regarding wildfire. We developed a conceptual framework describing landowners’ propensity to conduct fuel reduction as a function of objective and subjective factors relating to wildfire risk. We tested our conceptual framework using probit analysis of empirical data from a survey of non-industrial private forest landowners in the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) region of eastern Oregon (USA). Our empirical results confirm the conceptual framework and suggest that landowners’ perceptions of wildfire risk and propensity to conduct fuel treatments are correlated with hazardous fuel conditions on or near their parcels, whether they have housing or timber assets at risk, and their past experience with wildfire, financial capacity for conducting treatments and membership in forestry and fire protection organisations. Our results suggest that policies that increase awareness of hazardous fuel conditions on their property and potential for losses in residential and timber assets, and that enhance social networks through which awareness and risk perception are formed, could help to encourage fuel reduction among private forest landowners.
We analyzed wildfire exposure for key social and ecological features on the national forests in Oregon and Washington. The forests contain numerous urban interfaces, old growth forests, recreational ...sites, and habitat for rare and endangered species. Many of these resources are threatened by wildfire, especially in the east Cascade Mountains fire‐prone forests. The study illustrates the application of wildfire simulation for risk assessment where the major threat is from large and rare naturally ignited fires, versus many previous studies that have focused on risk driven by frequent and small fires from anthropogenic ignitions. Wildfire simulation modeling was used to characterize potential wildfire behavior in terms of annual burn probability and flame length. Spatial data on selected social and ecological features were obtained from Forest Service GIS databases and elsewhere. The potential wildfire behavior was then summarized for each spatial location of each resource. The analysis suggested strong spatial variation in both burn probability and conditional flame length for many of the features examined, including biodiversity, urban interfaces, and infrastructure. We propose that the spatial patterns in modeled wildfire behavior could be used to improve existing prioritization of fuel management and wildfire preparedness activities within the Pacific Northwest region.
Fuel reduction treatments prescribed in fire-suppressed forests of western North America pose an apparent paradox with respect to terrestrial carbon management. Such treatments have the immediate ...effect of reducing forest carbon stocks but likely reduce future carbon losses through the combustion and mortality caused by high-severity wildfires. Assessing the long-term impact of fuel treatment on the carbon balance of fire-prone forests has been difficult because of uncertainties regarding treatment and wildfire impacts on any given landscape. In this study we attempt to remove some of the confusion surrounding this subject by performing a sensitivity analysis wherein long-term, landscape-wide carbon stocks are simulated under a wide range of treatment efficacy, treatment lifespan, fire impacts, forest recovery rates, forest decay rates, and the longevity of wood products. Our results indicate a surprising insensitivity of long-term carbon stocks to both management and biological variables. After 80 years, a 1600% change in either forest growth or decomposition resulted in only a 40% change in total system carbon, and a 1600% change in either treatment application rate or efficacy in arresting fire spread resulted in only a 10% change in total system carbon. This insensitivity of long-term carbon stocks is due in part by the infrequency of treatment–wildfire interaction and in part by the controls imposed by maximum forest biomass. None of the fuel treatment simulation scenarios resulted in increased system carbon.
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► Wildfire rarity limits treatment–wildfire interaction. ► Large changes in treatment rate or efficacy produce only small changes in C stocks. ► Large changes in growth or decomposition produce only modest changes in C stocks. ► C stocks appear most sensitive to site-specific maximum forest biomass. ► Fuel treatments reduce wildfire but do not increase C stocks.
Expanding the footprint of natural fire has been proposed as one potential solution to increase the pace of forest restoration programs in fire‐adapted landscapes of the western USA. However, studies ...that examine the long‐term socio‐ecological trade‐offs of expanding natural fire to reduce wildfire risk and create fire resilient landscapes are lacking. We used the model Envision to examine the outcomes that might result from increased area burned by what we call “restoration” wildfire in a landscape where the ecological benefits of wildfire are known, but the need to suppress high‐risk fires that threaten human values is also evident. Our study area, in the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA, includes the Deschutes National Forest where large tracts of mixed conifer forest structure are outside the historical range of variation and characterized by multi‐layer, closed‐canopy stands. We found that simulation of one restoration wildfire per year in addition to high‐risk wildfires in the regular fire season and over the course of 50 yr resulted in a 23% increase in total area burned, but the same probability of fire‐on‐fire interactions. This translated into 0.3% of the national forest burned by restoration wildfire per year and had a small impact in area burned by high‐risk fires albeit more likely in extreme fire years. Smoke production doubled in the restoration scenario relative to the scenario without restoration wildfire, but still resulted in minimal smoke production in most years. Restoration fires burned with low‐ to mixed‐severity and led to a steady reduction in canopy cover and increase in resilient forest structure in dry‐forest types. Habitat for the federally protected northern spotted owl declined with the inclusion of restoration fire, while habitat for species that use recently burned forest stands (e.g., black‐backed woodpecker) increased. Our results suggest that restoration wildfire can improve forest resilience and contribute to restoration efforts in fire‐adapted forests, but there are trade‐offs (wildlife habitat, smoke, area burned in fire‐sensitive forest types), and the level of restoration fire use we simulated is unlikely to have a significant impact on the occurrence of high‐severity wildfires.
Wildland fire risk assessment and fuel management planning on federal lands in the US are complex problems that require state-of-the-art fire behavior modeling and intensive geospatial analyses. Fuel ...management is a particularly complicated process where the benefits and potential impacts of fuel treatments must be demonstrated in the context of land management goals and public expectations. A number of fire behavior metrics, including fire spread, intensity, likelihood, and ecological risk must be analyzed for multiple treatment alternatives. The effect of treatments on wildfire impacts must be considered at multiple scales. The process is complicated by the lack of data integration among fire behavior models, and weak linkages to geographic information systems, corporate data, and desktop office software. This paper describes our efforts to build a streamlined fuel management planning and risk assessment framework, and an integrated system of tools for designing and testing fuel treatment programs on fire-prone wildlands.
This paper examines the issue of radionuclide resuspension from wildland fires in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion in 1986. This work originated from a scientific ...exchange among scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Ukraine and Belarus that was organized to assess science and technology gaps related to wildfire risk management. A wildfire risk modeling system was developed to predict likely hotspots for large fires and where wildfire ignitions will most likely result in significant radionuclide (Cesium, 137Cs) resuspension. The system was also designed to examine the effect of fuel breaks in terms of reducing both burn probability and resuspension. Results showed substantial spatial variation in fire likelihood, size, intensity, and potential resuspension within the contaminated areas. The potential for a large wildfire and resuspension was highest in the Belorussian Polesie Reserve, but the likelihood of such an event was higher in the Ukrainian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone due to a higher predicted probability of ignition. Fuel breaks were most effective in terms of reducing potential resuspension when located near areas that had both high ignition probability and high levels of 137Cs contamination. Simulation outputs highlighted how human activities shape the fire regime and likelihood of a large fire in the contaminated areas. We discuss how the results can be used to develop a fire management strategy that integrates ignition prevention, detection, effective suppression response, and fuel breaks. Specifically, the modeling system can now be used to explore a wide range of fire management scenarios for the contaminated areas and contribute to a comprehensive fire management strategy that targets specific drivers of fire by leveraging multiple tools including fire prevention and long-term fuel management. Wildfire-caused emissions of radionuclides in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia are a socio-ecological problem that will require defragmenting existing risk management systems and leveraging multiple short- and long-term mitigation measures.
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•Wildfires are of growing concern in Chernobyl contaminated areas.•Resuspension of radionuclides from wildfires has potential adverse health effects.•We built a wildfire simulation system to predict risk of fires and resuspension.•The results revealed hotspots for fire ignitions and resuspension.•Targeted fuel breaks and ignition prevention could reduce future resuspension.
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