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SCIENCEx Fire: Fuels, Smoke and Post-Fire in the West - 2025 Panel Discussion Series

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The USDA Forest Service Research and Development is proud to host a series of SCIENCEx Fire panel discussions intended for fire, fuels and land managers on topics associated with the Wildfire Crisis Strategy and beyond. The SCIENCEx Fire panel discussions will provide big picture and synthetic looks at the current state of knowledge and management considerations for each topic.

Mental Health and Traumatic Occupational Exposure in Wildland Fire Dispatchers

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

Wildland fire dispatchers play a key role in wildland fire management and response organization; however, to date, wildland fire studies have largely focused on the physical hazards and, to a lesser extent, mental health hazards of wildland firefighting operational personnel, and dispatcher studies have primarily focused on 911 and police dispatchers.

Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables.

The fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020)

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast. Using satellite data, we analyzed the daily growth rates of more than 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020 across the contiguous US. Nearly half of the ecoregions experienced destructive fast fires that grew more than 1620 hectares in 1 day.