No abstract

We evaluated the impacts of climate change on the productivity and health of a forest in the mixed-conifer region in California. We adapted an industry-standard planning tool to forecast 30-years of growth for forest stands under a changing climate. Four projections of future climate (two global climate models and two emission forecasts) were examined for forests under three management regimes. Forest structural and tree demographic data from the Blodgett Forest Research Station in El Dorado County were used to fit our projections to realistic management regimes. Conifer tree growth declined under all climate scenarios and management regimes. The most extreme changes in climate decreased productivity, as measured by stem volume increment, in mature stands by 19% by 2100. More severe reductions in yield (25%) were observed for pine plantations. The reductions in growth under each scenario also resulted in moderate increases in susceptibility to non-catastrophic (i.e., non fire) causes of mortality in white fir (Abies concolor). For the worst case, median survival probability decreased from the baseline rate of 0.997 year −1 in 2002 to 0.982 year −1 by the end of the century.

Stochastic simulation models of initial attack on wildland fire can be designed to reflect the complexity of the environmental, administrative, and institutional context in which wildland fire protection agencies operate, but such complexity may come at the cost of a considerable investment in data acquisition and management. This cost may be well justified when it allows for analysis of a wider spectrum of operational problems in wildland fire protection planning. The California Fire Economics Simulator version 2 (CFES2), is a sophisticated stochastic simulation model designed to facilitate quantitative analysis of the potential effects of changes in many key components of most wildland fire systems, e.g. availability and stationing of resources, dispatch rules, criteria for setting fire dispatch level, staff schedules, and deployment and line-building tactics. The CFES2 model can also be used to support strategic planning with respect to vegetation management programs, development at the wildland–urban interface, reallocation of responsibilities among fire protection agencies, and climatic change. The analytical capacity of stochastic simulations models to address such key issues is demonstrated using the CFES2 model in four case studies addressing the impact on initial attack effectiveness of: (1) multiple fire starts; (2) diversion of firefighting resources to structure protection; (3) alternate stationing of firefighting resources; and (4) multi-agency cooperation.

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) residents in Michigan were interviewed using a contingent valuation protocol to assess their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for incremental reductions in the risk of losing their homes to wild-fire. WTP was elicited using a probability model which segments the risk of structure loss into “public” and “private” components. Most respondents expressed positive WTP for publicly funded risk reduction activities. These respondents were characterized by tolerance for property taxes, perception of significant risk, high ranking of fire risk relative to other hazards, and high objective estimates of existing risk, and their WTP amounts were positively correlated with income and property value. Given that 97% of the respondents were insured against property loss, the large number of positive WTP responses suggests that substantial non-market and unreimbursed losses are experienced when structures are destroyed by wildfires.