Human and Social Dimensions of Wildland Fire Management and Forest Protection

Abstract

Wildland fire is any fire that occurs on the wildlands, out of the urban settlements, regardless its ignition source, damages or benefits (FAO 1986; Society of American Foresters 1990; Pyne et al. 1996). Wildland fires can either correspond to (1) planned fires, used and controlled by humans with specific goals (such as traditional uses in agricultural, cultural practices or technical uses in forestry, like prescribed burns) or (2) fires that occur under no human purpose and control, that can be part of the normal life cycle of some forests and grasslands or, by the contrary, have a destructive impact on persons and on the environment (in this case, they are designated as wildfires, or bushfires, forest fire, rural fires, depending on the terminology adopted by different countries). Wildland fire management is a process that can be envisaged as the interconnection of four main elements, under a permanent exercise of planning: preparedness, prevention, response, and postfire recovery, integrated on a cyclical procedure, aimed at reducing the negative impact of wildland fires, introducing the positive aspects of fire in the ecosystems and improving the adaptability of humans in face of fire. It is a multiperspective process that should involve fire-related agencies, professionals and individual actors and their communities. Thus wildland fire management is intrinsically social and embraces, besides physical and ecological variables, human and social dimensions that refer to a scope of individualfire-landscape interactions, through the individual actor´s management activities and relationships with other actors and fire-related agencies or organizations (Ager et al. 2015; Kline et al. 2017; McCafrey et al. 2013).