Acceptability of Smoke From Prescribed Forest Burning in the Northern Inland West: A Focus Group Approach

Fire social science research–selected highlights.

“…Research has found a relationship between beliefs, knowledge and familiarity with a practice, and increased support for the practice. For example, knowledge about the ecological benefits of a practice is associated with increased support, particularly for more controversial aspects such as smoke from prescribed fire (Weisshaupt et al 2005). Trust and confidence in the implementing agency are also key factors influencing support (Absher andVaske 2007, Martin et al 2007).…”

Public Acceptance of Disturbance-Based Forest Management: Factors Influencing Support

“…The public's willingness to accept forest management practices is determined in part by their understanding of the risks and uncertainties associated with those practices-especially those which, like disturbance-based management, are unfamiliar or untested [31]. In this effort it will benefit agencies to be forthcoming about difficult decisions and the choices involved.…”

“…Knowledge of ecological problems and potential solutions (management practices) is another factor that previous studies suggest influences overall public acceptance [30,31]. In what is sometimes called the knowledge-deficit model, an increase in knowledge is correlated with an increase in attitude or support across most fields [32,33].…”

“…To further assess influences on public judgments about disturbance-based management, a bivariate correlation analysis was used to measure the relationship between citizen support for DBM and relevant factors identified from related studies: (1) respondent knowledge of forest management terms [30,31], (2) past interactions with agencies [36,45], and (3) trust in agencies [35,37,38]. Results are reported in Table 7.…”

Residents' perspectives on forest health issues and management practices in Mount Robson Provincial Park.

“…Current literature on attitudes of natural resource issues and management focuses primarily on resident's attitudes towards fire (See Brunson and Evans, 2005;Vogt, Winter and Fried, 2005;Weisshaupt, Carroll, Blatner, Robinson, andJakes, 2005 andSteelman andKunkel, 2004). As fire is a management action used in response to the MPB, both as prescribed burns and let burn policies for wildfires, the attitudes towards these fires will have some bearing on resident's attitudes of the MPB epidemic and management.…”