Every summer, wildfires burn thousands of acres of forests in the American West. After the fire, forest managers must decide what to do next: Leave the postfire landscape to recover naturally? Harvest some of the burned trees for timber? What combination of management actions is most likely to reduce the severity of a repeat wildfire and to make the forests more resilient?

Wildfires are heating up once again in the American West. In 2015, wildfires burned more than 10 million acres in the United States at a cost of $2.1 billion in federal expenditures. As the fires burned, the U.S. Forest Service announced that, for the first time, more than half of its budget would be devoted to wildfire. And the situation is likely to get worse.

The Dry Forest Investment Zone (DFIZ) is a five-year project to address common natural resource-based economic development challenges through increased networking and capacity building at a regional scale.

This annotated bibliography is collected from professional journals in natural resource management and sociology, conference proceedings, and technical reports.

Throughout much of the Pacific Northwest, the interplay between environmental and social change not only contributes to wildfire risk, but also complicates efforts to mitigate it.

Over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service to manage America’s 193-million acre national forests and grasslands for the benefit of all Americans.