Wildland firefighting in the United States is a complex and costly enterprise. While there are strong seasonal signatures for fire occurrence in specific regions of the United States, spatiotemporal occurrence of wildfire activity can have high inter-annual variability.
Characterising the impacts of wildland fire and fire suppression is critical information for fire management decision-making.
Restoration of western dry forests in the USA often focuses on reducing fuel loads. In the range of the spotted owl, these treatments may reduce canopy cover and tree density, which could reduce preferred habitat conditions for the owl and other sensitive species.
Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application.
As federal spending on wildland fire suppression has increased dramatically in recent decades, significant policymaking has been designed, at least in part, to address and temper rising costs. Effective strategies for controlling public spending and leveraging limited wildfire management resources depend on a comprehensive understanding of the drivers of suppression costs.
Each year, the general public and wildland firefighters in the US are exposed to smoke from wildland fires.
We present a case study of the Las Conchas Fire (2011) to explore the role of previously burned areas (wildfires and prescribed fires) on suppression effectiveness and avoided exposure.
Throughout the Sierra Nevada, nearly a century of fire suppression has altered the tree species composition, forest structure, and fire regimes that were previously characteristic of montane forests.
There is a widespread view among land managers and others that the protected status of many forestlands in the western United States corresponds with higher fire severity levels due to historical restrictions on logging that contribute to greater amounts of biomass and fuel loading in less intensively managed areas, particularly after decades of fire suppression.
Over the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies.