Wildfires bring stark attention to interactions among climate change, fire, forests, and livelihoods, prompting urgent calls for change from policy-makers and the public.
In his October 26, 2017 commentary in these pages, Dr. Tom Zimmerman highlights a number of ongoing and future challenges faced by wildland fire management. To address these challenges he also identifies an important role for science and in particular management-relevant wildland fire research. Here, we first briefly elaborate on Dr.
Tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America (USA) have long-standing relationships to ancestral lands now managed by federal land management agencies. In recent decades, federal and state governments have increasingly recognized tribal rights to resources on public lands and to participate in their management.
The concept of “reciprocity” between humans and other biota arises from the creation belief of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR).
To address rapid change and complex environmental management challenges, governance approaches must support collective action across actors and jurisdictions, and planning at appropriate spatial extents to affect ecological processes. Recent changes in U.S.
Prescribed fire, intentionally ignited low-intensity fires, and managed wildfires—wildfires that are allowed to burn for land management benefit—could be used as a land management tool to create forests that are resilient to wildland fire. This could lead to fewer large catastrophic wildfires in the future.
The landscape is an ideal spatial extent for managing forests because many ecological processes and disturbances occur on such scales. Moreover, landscape-level decision-making processes can improve the efficiency of forest management, as when many owners of small parcels increase the economy of scale of their operations by jointly hiring labor or selling products.
Many of the most pressing threats to forests result from complex interactions between multiple stressors and require management on large spatial and temporal scales.
As wildland fires have had increasing negative impacts on a range of human values, in many parts of the United States (U.S.) and around the world, collaborative risk reduction efforts among agencies, homeowners, and fire departments are needed to improve wildfire safety and mitigate risk.
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) Fire Science Exchange Network is a national collaboration of 15 regional fire science exchanges that provides the most relevant, current wildland fire science information to federal, state, local, tribal, and private stakeholders within ecologically similar regions.