A network approach to assessing social capacity for landscape planning: The case of fire-prone forests in Oregon, USA

Fischer, A. Paige; Vance-Borland, Ken; Jasny, Lorien; Grimm, Kerry E.; Charnley, Susan

doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.10.006

Cited by 47 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Our study population was defined as the set of individuals who had been identified as key stakeholders in a study on wildfire risk in the ECE that was conducted in 2011-2013. Specifically, participants of the prior study identified these individuals as people with whom they had interacted in the past five years to collaborate, seek information, provide advice, or influence in the context of wildfire response or wildfire-prone forest management (Fischer et al 2016b). To optimize the diversity of our sample in terms of geographic affiliation as well as stakeholder identity, we stratified our population by geographic region of interest as well as their main affiliation (e.g.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Hamilton

Salerno

Fischer

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Wildfire risk is a defining environmental challenge throughout much of the American West, as well as in other regions where complex social and ecological dynamics defy simple policy or management solutions. In such settings, diverse forms of land use, livelihoods, and accompanying values provide the conditions for trade-offs (e.g. between protecting homes from uncontrollable fires and restoring low-severity fire to ecosystems as a natural disturbance process). Addressing wildfire risk requires grappling with these trade-offs at multiple levels-given the need for action by individuals as well as by large and diverse stakeholder groups-and under conditions of considerable complexity. We evaluated how individual and collective perception of trade-offs varies as a function of complexity through analysis of the cognitive maps-representations of perceived causal relationships among factors that structure an individual's understanding of a system-of 111 stakeholders in the Eastern Cascades Ecoregion of central Oregon. Bayesian statistical analysis revealed a strong tendency against perception of trade-offs in individual maps, but not in a collective map that resulted from the aggregation of all individual cognitive maps. Furthermore, we found that lags (the number of factors that mediated the effect of an action on multiple valued outcomes) limited perception of trade-offs. Each additional intervening factor decreased the likelihood of a trade-off by approximately 52% in individual cognitive maps and by 10% in the collective cognitive map. However, the heterogeneity of these factors increased the likelihood of perception of trade-offs, particularly among individual cognitive maps, for which each unit increase of the Shannon diversity index translated into a 20-fold increase in the likelihood of perception of trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that features of complexity have distinct effects on individual-and collective-level perception of trade-offs. We discuss implications for wildfire risk decision-making in central Oregon and in other complex wildfire-prone social-ecological systems.

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Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Hamilton

Salerno

Fischer

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…In this study, network analysis of simulation outputs provided an analytical framework to disentangle transmission on a large fragmented landscape and visualize landscape fire connectivity. Fire networks describe where collaborative networks among institutions and landowners are most needed to facilitate transboundary planning (Fischer et al., ) to coordinate wildfire management, whether it be the design of fuel break systems for community wildfire protection, or managing wildfires as fuel treatments in fire‐adapted forests. Network metrics, including node degree, network density, transmission ratios, and transmitted fire, describe the typology of fire transmission on fragmented landscapes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As pointed out in other studies Bodin, Crona, & Ernstson, 2006;Fischer, Vance-Borland, Jasny, Grimm, & Charnley, 2016), network methods can inform landscape planning for restoration, biodiversity conservation, and fire protection efforts in a number of ways. In this study, network analysis of simulation outputs provided an analytical framework to disentangle transmission on a large fragmented landscape and visualize landscape fire connectivity.…”

Section: Network For Communicating Riskmentioning

confidence: 94%

Assessing Transboundary Wildfire Exposure in the Southwestern United States

et al. 2018

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We assessed transboundary wildfire exposure among federal, state, and private lands and 447 communities in the state of Arizona, southwestern United States. The study quantified the relative magnitude of transboundary (incoming, outgoing) versus nontransboundary (i.e., self-burning) wildfire exposure based on land tenure or community of the simulated ignition and the resulting fire perimeter. We developed and described several new metrics to quantify and map transboundary exposure. We found that incoming transboundary fire accounted for 37% of the total area burned on large parcels of federal and state lands, whereas 63% of the area burned was burned by ignitions within the parcel. However, substantial parcel to parcel variation was observed for all land tenures for all metrics. We found that incoming transboundary fire accounted for 66% of the total area burned within communities versus 34% of the area burned by self-burning ignitions. Of the total area burned within communities, private lands contributed the largest proportion (36.7%), followed by national forests (19.5%), and state lands (15.4%). On average seven land tenures contributed wildfire to individual communities. Annual wildfire exposure to structures was highest for wildfires ignited on state and national forest land, followed by tribal, private, and BLM. We mapped community firesheds, that is, the area where ignitions can spawn fires that can burn into communities, and estimated that they covered 7.7 million ha, or 26% of the state of Arizona. Our methods address gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments, and their implementation can help reduce fragmentation in governance systems and inefficiencies in risk planning.

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“…We found that the federal government was a key actor group in our study area , and attempts at representing policies, programs, and norms of agency actors could inform other CHANS research. We also mapped wildfire suppression and fuels management networks (Fischer et al 2016b). We found that exposure to fire suppression and wildfire-related agencies and organizations influences the likelihood that individual private landowners conduct risk mitigation activities .…”

Section: What We Learned About Actor Behavior and How To Represent Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The estimated regression coefficients that described social network influences on family forest owner and homeowner management behavior provide a coarse empirical link between existing social networks and the simulated management and mitigation activities of these actors should a dynamic social network simulation model ever be developed. Continued advancement of methods for representing social wildfire-related networks in CHANS empirical modeling (e.g., Fischer et al 2013a, 2016b, and Fischer and Jasny 2017 could present such opportunities in the future.…”

Section: What We Learned About Actor Behavior and How To Represent Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating social science into empirical models of coupled human and natural systems

Kline¹,

White²,

Fischer³

et al. 2017

E&S

Self Cite

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ABSTRACT. Coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) research highlights reciprocal interactions (or feedbacks) between biophysical and socioeconomic variables to explain system dynamics and resilience. Empirical models often are used to test hypotheses and apply theory that represent human behavior. Parameterizing reciprocal interactions presents two challenges for social scientists:(1) how to represent human behavior as influenced by biophysical factors and integrate this into CHANS empirical models; (2) how to organize and function as a multidisciplinary social science team to accomplish that task. We reflect on these challenges regarding our CHANS research that investigated human adaptation to fire-prone landscapes. Our project sought to characterize the forest management activities of land managers and landowners (or "actors") and their influence on wildfire behavior and landscape outcomes by focusing on biophysical and socioeconomic feedbacks in central Oregon (USA). We used an agent-based model (ABM) to compile biophysical and social information pertaining to actor behavior, and to project future landscape conditions under alternative management scenarios. Project social scientists were tasked with identifying actors' forest management activities and biophysical and socioeconomic factors that influence them, and with developing decision rules for incorporation into the ABM to represent actor behavior. We (1) briefly summarize what we learned about actor behavior on this fire-prone landscape and how we represented it in an ABM, and (2) more significantly, report our observations about how we organized and functioned as a diverse team of social scientists to fulfill these CHANS research tasks. We highlight several challenges we experienced, involving quantitative versus qualitative data and methods, distilling complex behavior into empirical models, varying sensitivity of biophysical models to social factors, synchronization of research tasks, and the need to substitute spatial for temporal variation in social data and models, among others. We offer recommendations that other research teams might consider when collaborating with social scientists in CHANS research.

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A network approach to assessing social capacity for landscape planning: The case of fire-prone forests in Oregon, USA

Cited by 47 publications

References 44 publications

Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Cognition of complexity and trade-offs in a wildfire-prone social-ecological system

Assessing Transboundary Wildfire Exposure in the Southwestern United States

Integrating social science into empirical models of coupled human and natural systems

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