Wildfire smoke is typically a mixture of water vapor, gases, fine particles, and trace minerals from burning fuels like trees and vegetation, other organic components, and, sometimes, building materials.

Watch the video on our YouTube Channel.

This literature review synthesizes empirical research about wildland fire communication to provide practitioners, such as land managers, public health and safety officials, community groups, and others working with the public, evidence-based recommendations for communication work. Key findings demonstrate that it is important to recognize communication as a context-specific and dynamic process, not a linear pathway or prescription, or one-size-fits-all approach. We found that practitioners engaging in this work may be most effective when they get to know their diverse publics, engage in honest and sincere relationship building, and communicate in ways that are locally and culturally relevant. This review offers recommendations from the academic literature for how and where to engage in communication about wildland fire and smoke from wildland fire. These recommendations are not intended to be a set of rigid prescriptions; rather, they are intended to provide a starting point for practitioners to think about the multiple ways to engage with the diverse groups with whom they work.

Where and which tribally-important ecosystem services will be affected by climate change in the Pacific Northwest?

Here in the American West, a new generation of wildfires has become part of daily life. As the climate continues to warm and drought becomes more prolonged, our wildfire risk will continue to increase.  This Fire Facts guide was created to provide basic wildfire information, background, terminology, and resources to increase your knowledge and understanding of wildland fire and the ways we can all contribute to better fire outcomes.

Wildfire involves a diversity of land managers, owners, and stakeholders with their own roles and resources. Strategic coordination across this diversity of actors can be challenging. Social science research about collaboration recognizes the importance of building trust, but that can be hard to foster at large scales. To sustain necessary collective action, we find that a number of “boundary spanning features” may be key. These “BSFs” create ways for different actors to understand each other, share resources and responsibilities, and implement their visions.

With exposure to wildland fire smoke projectedto further increase (Barbero et al. 2015) there is aclear need for efforts to better mitigate or adapt tosmoke impacts in high-risk areas. Such efforts relyon an understanding of how people perceive, planfor, and respond to smoke. This synthesis compilespublished scholarly literature on how individualsperceive wildland fire smoke to offer an overviewof current knowledge on wildland fire smoke perceptions.It is intended to serve as a documentationof the scope, parameters, and gaps of researchto date in this field.

The Oregon State University Forestry & Natural Resources Extension Fire Program created a StoryMap to aid in wildfire recovery. The StoryMap describes the events that caused the Labor Day wildfires, contains a map showing relevant spatial data (e.g. burn severity), and lists resources covering a variety of post-fire topics.

People living in the Pacific Northwest confrontrisks associated with environmental hazards such as wildfire. Vulnerability to wildfire hazard is commonly recognized as being spatially distributed according to geographic conditions that collectively determine the probability of exposure. For example, exposure to wildfire hazard is higher for people living in rural, forested settings than in a strictly urban neighborhood because rural housing is built in close proximity to the threat source, e.g., flammable landscapes such as forests and chaparral. Yet, even if levels of exposure are held constant, not all people are equally susceptible to wildfire events. In other words, some people are more vulnerable to harm than others.