Fires that matter: reconceptualizing fire risk to include interactions between humans and the natural environment

Iglesias, Virginia; Stavros, E. Natasha; Balch, Jennifer K.; Barrett, Kimiko; Cobian-Iñiguez, Jeanette; Hester, Cyrus; Kolden, Crystal A.; Leyk, Stefan; Nagy, R. Chelsea; Reid, Colleen E.; Wiedinmyer, Christine; Woolner, Elizabeth; Travis, William R.

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac5c0c

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 98 publications

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“…More broadly across the West, our results imply that the emergence of fire-regime shifts will be marked by exceptional fire years in individual landscapes and regions, as seen in the Southern Rockies, which may result in a 'ratchet of events' driving ecosystem changes across space and time [84,85]. Furthermore, while climateenabled extreme fire events may have historical precedents, wildfire risk from unintentional ignitionsas well as exposure of communities in the wildlandurban interface-far exceed historical conditions [13]. Planning for community response and resource management would benefit from increasingly anticipating extreme events and the risks they pose to human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services at regional scales.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Increased fire activity in high-elevation forests across the western US has been especially pronounced, as widespread burning in these forests is typically limited by high fuel moisture and short fire seasons [10]. Higher fire activity in turn has wide-ranging impacts on species turnover, water resources, and human communities [11][12][13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wildfire activity in northern Rocky Mountain subalpine forests still within millennial-scale range of variability

Wolf

Higuera

Shuman

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Increasing area burned across western North America raises questions about the precedence and magnitude of changes in fire activity, relative to the historical range of variability (HRV) that ecosystems experienced over recent centuries and millennia. Paleoecological records of past fire occurrence provide context for contemporary changes in ecosystems characterized by infrequent, high-severity fire regimes. Here we present a network of 12 fire-history records derived from macroscopic charcoal preserved in sediments of small subalpine lakes within a c. 10,000 km2 landscape in the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains (Northern Rockies). We used this network to characterize landscape-scale burning over the past 2500 yr, and to evaluate the precedence of widespread regional burning experienced in the early 20th and 21st centuries. We further compare the Northern Rockies fire history to a previously published network of fire-history records in the Southern Rockies. In Northern Rockies subalpine forests, widespread fire activity was strongly linked to seasonal climate conditions, in contemporary, historical, and paleo records. The average estimated fire rotation period (FRP) over the past 2500 years was 164 yr (HRV: 127-225 yr), while the contemporary FRP from 1900-2021 CE was 215 yr. Thus, extensive regional burning in the early 20th century (e.g., 1910 CE) and in recent decades remains within the HRV of recent millennia. Results from the Northern Rockies contrast with the Southern Rockies, which burned with less frequency on average over the past 2500 yr, and where 21st-century burning has exceeded the HRV. Our results support expectations that Northern Rockies fire activity will continue to increase with climatic warming, surpassing historical burning if more than one exceptional fire year akin to 1910 occurs within the next several decades. The ecological consequences of climatic warming in subalpine forests will depend, in large part, on the magnitude of fire-regime changes relative to the past.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wildfire activity in northern Rocky Mountain subalpine forests still within millennial-scale range of variability

Wolf

Higuera

Shuman

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…Human activity affects fire in different ways, through direct ignitions or fire suppression (Fig. 2, direct arrow to stressors) or indirectly by altering environmental factors, for example by managing fuel load or by altering landscape properties 59,82 . At longer timescales, species selection and management practices influence forest composition, structure and biodiversity, and thus resistance and resilience to extremes 52 .…”

Section: Internal Ecosystem Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A joint framework for studying compound ecoclimatic events

Bastos

Sippel

Frank

et al. 2023

Nat Rev Earth Environ

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Extreme weather and climate events have direct impacts on ecosystems and can further trigger ecosystem disturbances, often having impacts that last longer than the event's duration. The projected increased frequency or intensity of extreme events could thus amplify ecological impacts and reduce the biosphere's CO 2 mitigation potential, but multiple feedbacks between ecosystems and climate extremes are often not considered in risk assessments. In this Perspective, we propose a systemic framework to analyse the causal relationships between climate extremes, disturbance regimes and ecosystems, building on two broadly used perspectives: climate risk assessment and disturbance ecology. Each has strengths and limitations, as each perspective places a differentand partly disjointed -focus on the physical and ecological processes that drive high-impact ecological events. We unify these approaches into a framework (compound ecoclimatic events) that decomposes events into climatic drivers, stressors, environmental factors, impacts and their sources of variability, and further incorporates feedbacks between ecosystem processes and stressors. This framework can be used to develop ecoclimatic storylines to better understand the role of each factor in influencing high-impact events; to incorporate uncertainties associated with internal climate and ecological variability, with scenario definitions, and with epistemic uncertainties; and to quantify the human fingerprint on high-impact ecoclimatic events. Sections Introduction Viewpoints on ecoclimatic eventsReframing ecoclimatic events

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“…Local informal networks are key to achieving behavioural change in land use and wildfire management and to create legitimacy in wildfire governance aiming to overcome the policy practice gap (Carmenta et al 2017, Iglesias et al 2022, Platt et al 2022. There is much evidence on the importance of local stakeholders organizing via formal and informal networks (e.g., neighborhood, landowner, or industrial associations) to make decisions on wildfire management.…”

Section: Actor Participation In Decision-making and Decision Takingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing wildfires: toward a systematic analytical framework

Kirschner¹,

Clark²,

Boustras³

2023

E&S

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Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in decision-making and decision taking; (2) actor collaboration and coproduction across and within levels, scales, and networks; (3) path dependencies and local place-based dynamics of wildfire incidence and comprehension; and (4) actor adaptation to and anticipation of wildfire risk to fashion effective institutions that address the global wildfire challenge. We show how this framework can help specify a suite of bespoke analytical and policy practitioner approaches to facilitate preemptive and restorative wildfire strategies via new networks between communities, states, and wider society, thus providing the basis for more equitable and sustainable governance of wildfire risks and impacts.

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Fires that matter: reconceptualizing fire risk to include interactions between humans and the natural environment

Cited by 25 publications

References 98 publications

Wildfire activity in northern Rocky Mountain subalpine forests still within millennial-scale range of variability

Wildfire activity in northern Rocky Mountain subalpine forests still within millennial-scale range of variability

A joint framework for studying compound ecoclimatic events

Governing wildfires: toward a systematic analytical framework

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