Cross-boundary cooperation for landscape management: Collective action and social exchange among individual private forest landowners

Fischer, A. Paige; Klooster, A. van der; Cirhigiri, Lora

doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.02.004

Cited by 69 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 65 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Landscape-scale environmental management has gained momentum not just as an approach to wildfire risk reduction, but as an approach to managing rangelands, wildlife, water, invasive plants, and forest insects and diseases as well (Bobzien and Van Alstyne 2014, Charnley et al 2014, Scarlett and McKinney 2016, Fischer et al 2019. Insights derived from this study about how to promote wildfire risk reduction through collective action across property boundaries can be applied to other environmental management contexts for large landscape conservation in the American West.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West

Charnley

Kelly

Fischer

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental public good (fire-resilient forests), and empirical examples of collective action from six projects that are part of the US Forest Service-Natural Resources Conservation Service Joint Chiefs' Landscape Restoration Partnership. Our findings are based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 104 individuals who were purposively selected to represent the diverse stakeholders involved in these projects. Fostering collective action to restore fire-resilient forests entails getting as many landowners (especially large landowners) to participate in wildfire risk reduction as possible to increase its areal extent; and landowner coordination in planning and implementing strategicallydesigned restoration treatments to optimize their effectiveness. We identify factors that enabled and constrained landowner participation and coordination in the Joint Chiefs' projects. Based on our findings and theory about when collective action will emerge, we specify a suite of practices to promote collective action for wildfire risk reduction across property boundaries, emphasizing incentives and enabling conditions. These include proactive education and outreach targeting landowners; multi-stakeholder processes with broad landowner representation to develop coordinated management approaches; financial and technical assistance to support fuels treatments on all ownerships within similar time frames; strong partnerships; and using common forestry professionals to plan and implement treatments on different ownerships (especially private lands). Our findings can inform cross-boundary management for landscape-scale conservation and restoration in other contexts.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…American West?Previous studies that examine this question have focused on family forest owner behavior (e.g. Fischer and Charnley 2012, Ferranto et al 2013, Gan et al 2015, Canadas et al 2016, Fischer et al 2019 and governance (e.g. Schultz et al 2018, Cyphers and Schultz 2019, Kelly et al 2019, Schultz and Moseley 2019.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West

Charnley

Kelly

Fischer

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The responsibilities involved in land management are becoming more complex [1][2][3][4]. Moreover, public awareness of land management and sustainability issues is growing in many sectors, including spatial planning, and is placing greater expectations on managers to balance competing values [5][6][7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Physical and Geographical Regionalization and Environmental Management: A Case Study in Poland

Macias¹,

Bródka²,

Kubacka³

et al. 2020

Pol. J. Environ. Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents certain aspects connected with the use of physical and geographic regionalization at the level of the Wielkopolskie Voivodeship in Poland. The aspects are important from the point of view of landscape management. Regionalization focuses on unique (one-off) features that distinguish particular regions from one another. The selection of criteria as well as the research procedure applied prove the universal nature of the results obtained. Detailed characteristics of particular units allow for comprehensive analysis of environmental conditions in shaping human activity and the implementation thereof into future strategic and programme documents related to spatial and economic planning on regional and local scales.

show abstract

“…The cross-boundary nature of the problem has stimulated multiple new authorities, regulations, and exec-utive orders that specifically address coordinated management across social and political boundaries (US Congress, 2014;USDA Forest Service, 2015a. Implementation of these authorities to perform risk reduction on mixed ownership planning areas has helped demonstrate how crossboundary collaboration can amplify the capacity of risk reduction activities by leveraging the economies of scale, i.e., expand the scale of fuel management (Graham et al, 2010;Ager et al, 2011) and community protection programs (Sexton, 2006;Abrams et al, 2016) commensurate with the scale of wildfire events (Charnley et al, 2016;Fischer et al, 2018;Markus et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite new legislation and a growing number of fuel management and restoration cross-boundary projects, there has not been a systematic large-scale assessment of the extent to which fire is exchanged among the major landowners in the western US or elsewhere. Yet, several recent studies have stressed the need to map potential cross-boundary wildfire as a means to better target areas where cross-boundary planning is needed to solve wildfire issues (Ager et al, 2014b(Ager et al, , 2018Fischer et al, 2018;Evers et al, 2019;Hamilton et al, 2019). For instance, where are zones of high fire transmission between large tracts of US federal and private lands, and are the former areas priorities for investment in hazardous fuel treatments?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fine-scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events in the western United States

Palaiologou

Ager

Evers

et al. 2019

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. We report a fine-scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events for the western US. We used simulation modeling to quantify the extent of fire exchange among major federal, state, and private land tenures and mapped locations where fire ignitions can potentially affect populated places. We examined how parcel size affects wildfire transmission and partitioned the relative amounts of transmitted fire between human and natural ignitions. We estimated that 85 % of the total predicted wildfire activity, as measured by area burned, originates from four land tenures (Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, private, and state lands) and 63 % of the total amount results from natural versus human ignitions. On average, one-third of the area burned by predicted wildfires was nonlocal, meaning that the source ignition was on a different land tenure. Land tenures with smaller parcels tended to receive more incoming fire on a proportional basis, while the largest fires were generated from ignitions in national parks, national forests, and public and tribal lands. Among the 11 western states, the amount and pattern of cross-boundary fire varied substantially in terms of which land tenures were mostly exposed, by whom, and to what extent. We also found spatial variability in terms of community exposure among states, and more than half of the predicted structure exposure was caused by ignitions on private lands or within the wildland–urban interface areas. This study addressed gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments that do not explicitly consider cross-boundary fire transmission and do not identify the source of fire. The results can be used by state, federal, and local fire planning organizations to help improve risk mitigation programs.

show abstract

Cross-boundary cooperation for landscape management: Collective action and social exchange among individual private forest landowners

Cited by 69 publications

References 65 publications

Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West

Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West

Physical and Geographical Regionalization and Environmental Management: A Case Study in Poland

Fine-scale assessment of cross-boundary wildfire events in the western United States

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About