The Science of Firescapes: Achieving Fire-Resilient Communities

Abstract

Wildland fire management has reached a crossroads. Current perspectives are not capable of answering interdisciplinary adaptation and mitigation challenges posed by increases in wildfire risk to human populations and the need to reintegrate fire as a vital landscape process. Fire science has been, and continues to be, performed in isolated “silos,” including institutions (e.g., agencies versus universities), organizational structures (e.g., federal agency mandates versus local and state procedures for responding to fire), and research foci (e.g., physical science, natural science, and social science). These silos tend to promote research, management, and policy that focus only on targeted aspects of the “wicked” wildfire problem. In this article, we provide guiding principles to bridge diverse fire science efforts to advance an integrated agenda of wildfire research that can help overcome disciplinary silos and provide insight on how to build fire-resilient communities.

Air quality policy and fire management responses addressing smoke from wildland fires in the United States and Australia

“…Increasing populations in the wildland-urban interface, climate change and growing recognition of health impacts from wildland fire emissions require continued engagement among land-management agencies, air regulators and the public. Communities within fire-prone areas must either tolerate smoke or actively undertake adaptation (such as fuels management) or mitigation (such as evacuations) actions to decrease exposure (Moritz et al 2014;Smith et al 2016). Clearly, decisions should be made to reduce the vulnerability of sensitive groups, while minimising hazards from future wildfires.…”

“…Unlike emissions from industry and transportation, wildland fire emissions are spatially and temporally episodic and they can impair visibility and have negative short-and long-term impacts on public health (Crutzen and Andreae 1990;Bowman et al 2009;Liu et al 2015;Adetona et al 2016). Thus, although wildland fires are inevitable and have an essential role in many terrestrial ecosystems, the smoke produced by these fires is a considerable societal concern (Bowman et al 2009;Smith et al 2016). Balancing the management of wildland fires in a way that preserves ecosystem function and maintains air quality to protect human health remains a substantial research and environmental policy challenge (Haikerwal et al 2015;Schweizer and Cisneros 2016).…”

Using community archetypes to better understand differential community adaptation to wildfire risk

“…We suggest a parallel focus on collective behaviour at the community level, which is where there is great potential for innovation and adaptation [27,36,37]. Likewise, there is no shortage of recent efforts to develop a 'bigger picture' of wildfire dynamics and management in various countries or at a global level [4,5,42]. More rarely are these efforts locally grounded in systematic approaches for understanding and comparing the diverse set of populations who will 'live with fire' in very different ways.…”

“…A very small fraction of fire starts evade initial suppression control and become larger conflagrations that threaten not only surrounding forests and grasslands, but also human safety and infrastructure. This can lead to a number of consequences, many of which reinforce or perpetuate a system of what is increasingly seen as unsustainable wildfire suppression [3][4][5].…”

“…Increasing wildfire risks are driven significantly by the relationships (or couplings) between social and biophysical systems [4,20,21]. It is widely recognized that human development patterns, historic land management policies and the structure of firefighting administration in many places in the world are contributors to the challenges posed by wildfires and must be considered as part of any long-term 'solutions' [1,22].…”