Employing resilience in the United States Forest Service

Bone, Christopher; Moseley, Cassandra; Vinyeta, Kirsten; Bixler, R. Patrick

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.01.003

Cited by 36 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The US Forest Service's National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (42) specifically addresses the need to bolster social and ecological resilience to increasing wildfires. Although often invoked in wildfire management and policy, resilience is defined inconsistently or neglects social or ecological contexts, despite the need for uniformity and specification in setting goals and evaluating progress (43,44).…”

Section: Specified Adaptive and Transformative Resilience To Wildfirementioning

confidence: 99%

Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

Schoennagel

Balch

Brenkert–Smith

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

593

416

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Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland-urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. Although many plants, animals, and ecosystem services benefit from fire, it is unknown how ecosystems will respond to increased burning and warming. Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed. Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire. These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildlandurban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire.wildfire | resilience | forests | wildland-urban interface | policy

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Section: Specified Adaptive and Transformative Resilience To Wildfirementioning

confidence: 99%

Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

Schoennagel

Balch

Brenkert–Smith

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

593

416

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…At this junction, it is unclear how fire adaptation is understood beyond the stakeholders who are engaged in the formal reframing of wildfire adaptation policy and programs. Importantly, recent work argues that agencies engaged in management at the intersection of natural resources, hazards and disasters, and climate change may need "clear definitions and applications" in order to forge a path forward (Bone et al 2015).…”

Section: Fire Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where you stand depends on where you sit: qualitative inquiry into notions of fire adaptation

Brenkert–Smith¹,

Meldrum²,

Champ³

et al. 2017

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Wildfire and the threat it poses to society represents an example of the complex, dynamic relationship between social and ecological systems. Increasingly, wildfire adaptation is posited as a pathway to shift the approach to fire from a suppression paradigm that seeks to control fire to a paradigm that focuses on "living with" and "adapting to" wildfire. In this study, we seek insights into what it means to adapt to wildfire from a range of stakeholders whose efforts contribute to the management of wildfire. Study participants provided insights into the meaning, relevance, and use of the concept of fire adaptation as it relates to their wildfire-related activities. A key finding of this investigation suggests that social scale is of key importance in the conceptualization and understanding of adaptation for participating stakeholders. Indeed, where you stand in terms of understandings of fire adaptation depends in large part on where you sit.

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“…To manage for ecological resilience, land managers must have a standardized and scientifically credible method of quantifying resilience based on concrete concepts that can be translated into multiple use analysis and planning (Bone et al. , Stephens et al. , Colavito , Dale et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ideally, the variables used to evaluate resilience must be readily measurable in the field and represent attributes that are used commonly in land management planning (Bone et al. ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Management for ecological resilience, mandated by some U.S. public land policies, is intended to guide land stewardship in a context of profound environmental challenges caused by complex and potentially novel interactions of anthropogenic climate changes, shifting fire regimes, exotic plant, insect, and pathogen invasions, and industrial, agricultural, and urban development (Moritz and Agudo 2013, Joyce et al 2014, Bone et al 2016, Kolb et al 2016, Smith et al 2016, Schoennagel et al 2017. For example, the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy identifies creating resilient landscapes as the first of its three major goals (USDOI and USDA 2014) and the U.S. Forest Service is mandated to restore natural resources to be "more resilient to climate change" as stated in the 2012 National Forest Planning Rule (USFS 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Use of landscape simulation modeling to quantify resilience for ecological applications

et al. 2018

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Goals of fostering ecological resilience are increasingly used to guide U.S. public land management in the context of anthropogenic climate change and increasing landscape disturbances. There are, however, few operational means of assessing the resilience of a landscape or ecosystem. We present a method to evaluate resilience using simulation modeling. In this method, we use historical conditions (e.g., in North America, prior to European settlement), quantified using simulation modeling, to provide a comparative reference for contemporary conditions, where substantial departures indicate loss of resilience. Contemporary ecological conditions are compared statistically to the historical time series to create a resilience index, which can be used to prioritize landscapes for treatment and inform possible treatments. However, managing for resilience based on historical conditions is tenuous in the Anthropocene, which is characterized by rapid climate change, extensive human land use, altered disturbance regimes, and exotic species introductions. To account for the future variability of ecosystems resulting from climate and disturbance regime shifts, we augment historical simulations with simulations of ecosystem dynamics under projected climate and land use changes to assess the degree of departure from benchmark historical conditions. We use a mechanistic landscape model (FireBGCv2) applied to a large landscape in western Montana, USA, to illustrate the methods presented in this paper. Spatially explicit ecosystem modeling provides the vehicle to generate the historical and future time series needed to quantify potential resilience conditions associated with past and potential future conditions. Our methods show that given selection of a useful set of metrics, managers could use simulations like ours to evaluate potential future management directions.

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Employing resilience in the United States Forest Service

Cited by 36 publications

References 35 publications

Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

Where you stand depends on where you sit: qualitative inquiry into notions of fire adaptation

Use of landscape simulation modeling to quantify resilience for ecological applications

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