Rethinking resilience to wildfire (original) (raw)
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The Science of Firescapes: Achieving Fire-Resilient Communities
BioScience, 2016
Wildland fire management has reached a crossroads. Current perspectives are not capable of answering interdisciplinary adaptation and mitigation challenges posed by increases in wildfire risk to human populations and the need to reintegrate fire as a vital landscape process. Fire science has been, and continues to be, performed in isolated "silos, " including institutions (e.g., agencies versus universities), organizational structures (e.g., federal agency mandates versus local and state procedures for responding to fire), and research foci (e.g., physical science, natural science, and social science). These silos tend to promote research, management, and policy that focus only on targeted aspects of the "wicked" wildfire problem. In this article, we provide guiding principles to bridge diverse fire science efforts to advance an integrated agenda of wildfire research that can help overcome disciplinary silos and provide insight on how to build fire-resilient communities.
Native Fire Regimes and Landscape Resilience
First introduced by Holling (1973), the term “resilience” has been used widely in the ecological literature, but it is not always defined and is rarely quantified. Holling suggested that ecological resilience is the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem could withstand without changing self-organized processes and structures. His description suggests that resilience may be: (1) represented by an observable set of properties; (2) defined by measures of degree; and (3) related to system states and their (in)tolerance to reshaping, and that some properties of resilience may be quantifiable. We also see the idea of fire resilience in the literature (e.g., MacGillivray and Grime 1995; He and Mladenoff 1999; Díaz-Delgado et al. 2002; Brown et al. 2004; Pausas et al. 2004), but this term has different meanings in diverse contexts.
Environmental Research Letters
Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires. However, a myriad of human and ecological factors constrain adaptation, and existing science-based management strategies are not sufficient to address fire as both a problem and solution. To that end, we present a novel risk-science approach that aligns wildfire response decisions, mitigation opportunities, and land management objectives by consciously integrating social, ecological and fire management system needs. We use fire-prone landscapes of the US Pacific Northwest as our study area, and report on and describe how three complementary risk-based analytic tools—quantitative wildfire risk assessment, mapping of suppression difficulty, and atlases of potential control locations—can form the foundation for adaptive governance in fire management. Together...
Literature Review for the Paradise Wildfire Resilience Project
2021
As part of the project "Nature-Based Wildfire Resilience in Paradise, California," Conservation Biology Institute produced this review and summary of the most recent scientific research describing fire behavior in relation to land use patterns. The overarching objective of the review is to summarize relevant literature to determine how structure loss or other metrics of human impacts are affected by community design, and especially how buffering communities with lower-flammability land uses (e.g., green spaces or agriculture) could potentially reduce structure loss and simultaneously protect natural areas from human impacts. Specifically, we assemble information that could help determine: ● how greenbelts have the potential to mitigate wildfire impacts on California's communities, and inversely, community impacts on wildlands; ● relevant design elements or parameters such as buffer width, composition, or management that affect wildfire risks in differing ecological con...
Learning to coexist with wildfire
Nature, 2014
F ire is unique among the natural hazards that affect human communities and the ecosystems on which we depend 1 . Although humans sometimes intentionally ignite and manage fires, our main focus is on fighting them. For other natural hazards, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, there is much more emphasis on identifying vulnerabilities and adaptations. The 'command and control' approach 2 typically used in fire management neglects the fundamental role that fire regimes have in sustaining biodiversity and key ecosystem services 3-6 . Unless people view and plan for fire as an inevitable and natural process, it will continue to have serious consequences for both social and ecological systems.
2019
Until Euro-American colonization, Indigenous people used fire to modify eco-cultural systems, developing robust Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Since 1980, wildfire activity has increased due to fire-suppression and climate change. In 2017, in Waterton Lakes National Park, AB, the Kenow wildfire burned 19,303 ha, exhibiting extreme fire behavior. It affected forests and the Eskerine Complex, a native-grass prairie treated with prescribed burns since 2006 to reduce aspen (Populus tremuloides) encroachment linked to fire suppression and bison (Bison bison bison) extirpation. One-year post-fire, the Kenow wildfire caused vigorous aspen sprouting, altered stand structure to an early-seral state, and dominant land cover from grass to mineral soil. It did not change aspen-cover extent, or cause non-native grass eruption, but reduced native-grass diversity, and produced more pronounced shifts in ecosystem structure and biodiversity than the prescribed burns. The 2017 Kenow wildfire...
Wildfires, complexity, and highly optimized tolerance
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 2005
Recent, large fires in the western United States have rekindled debates about fire management and the role of natural fire regimes in the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems. This real-world experience parallels debates involving abstract models of forest fires, a central metaphor in complex systems theory. Both real and modeled fire-prone landscapes exhibit roughly power law statistics in fire size versus frequency. Here, we examine historical fire catalogs and a detailed fire simulation model; both are in agreement with a highly optimized tolerance model. Highly optimized tolerance suggests robustness tradeoffs underlie resilience in different fire-prone ecosystems. Understanding these mechanisms may provide new insights into the structure of ecological systems and be key in evaluating fire management strategies and sensitivities to climate change.
The recent worldwide increase of large, uncontrolled, and catastrophic wildfires events, caused important socio-economic issues and with considerable effects to the natural environment. Wildfires’ impacts on social-ecological systems derive from the complicated and multidimensional interconnected relationships between society and ecosystems. To enforce environmental and community resilience against wildfires, it is critical to holistically comprehend the local social-ecological systems. In this paper we present a holistic social-ecological systems resilience approach, built on performance-based wildfire engineering, that is envisioned to be a steppingstone towards the social-ecological resilience after a wildfire. To attain this objective, the performance assessment and design series of actions are disaggregated into explicit components of a rigorous mathematical framework. They are linked to a causal inference chain, providing an integrated picture, and enabling decision analysis t...
Resilience and fire management in the Anthropocene
Ecology and Society
Fire management around the world is now undergoing extensive review, with a move toward fire management plans that maintain biodiversity and other ecosystems services, while at the same time mitigating the negative impacts to people and property. There is also increasing recognition of the historical and anthropogenic dimensions that underlie current fire regimes and the likelihood that projected future climate change will lead to more fires in most regions. Concurrently, resilience theory is playing an increasingly important role in understanding social-ecological systems, and new principles are emerging for building resilience in both human and natural components. Long-term fire data, provided by paleoecological and historical studies, provide a baseline of knowledge about the linkages between climate, vegetation, fire regimes, and humans across multiple temporal and spatial scales. This information reveals how processes interacting over multiple spatial and temporal scales shape the local fire conditions that influence human and ecological response. This multiscale perspective is an important addition to adaptive fire management strategies that seek to build resilience, incorporate stakeholder perspectives, and support polycentric decision making.