This project focuses on improving our understanding of how biophysical systems, management actions, and socio-economic influences interact to affect sustainability in fire-prone landscapes under climate change. This work integrates social and ecological sciences to study a fire-prone landscape in central Oregon that includes private, state, federal, and tribal lands. Our method will combine an established spatially explicit, policy-driven, multiagent model of land management decision-making, models of vegetative succession and fire ignition/spread that can represent climate change effects, and a suite of landscape evaluators of socio-economic and ecological system performance. The project will integrate existing studies of ecosystems with new and ongoing studies characterizing human preferences and values in these landscapes to parameterize the multiagent model with defensible representations of human decision-making. We will extend the application of agent-based models to study how social networks influence landscape dynamics and adaptation, and explore landscape trajectories under alternative policy and climate change scenarios using Monte Carlo techniques to understand variant/invariant aspects of landscape change, land management policy strategies, human preferences, and ecosystem feedbacks. These analyses will help identify management strategies that increase adaptive capacity of these landscapes to respond to uncertain futures. We anticipate this project will: 1) reveal complex system behaviors associated with fire-prone landscapes, 2) improve effectiveness of forest management policies in multiownership fire-prone landscapes, 3) improve understanding of the role of social networks (e.g. fire protection districts and environmental organizations) and economic forces in influencing how landowners and managers make decisions under risk and uncertainty, and 4) improve understanding of how external forces of climate change and carbon markets could affect policy outcomes, biodiversity, and ecosystem services.
Wildland fire policies in the U.S. are fragmented and broken, largely because land and wildfire management policies do not fully consider human and ecological effects. Typically, the fire-prone landscape is divided into a "wildland-urban interface" under the influence of fire management agencies, and a wild landscape under the influence of land managers. These two fire worlds are often seen as socially, economically, and organizationally separate, yet they are clearly part of a single interconnected landscape. Lack of understanding of these connections has lead to policies that are ineffective or even counterproductive. For example, fire suppression can increase the severity of fires and draws resources away from necessary ecological restoration work in wilder parts of the landscape. The problem of adaptation to fire-prone landscapes is even more challenging when climate change and carbon markets are considered. In order to develop more effective policies, we need to improve our understanding of how social systems - networks and institutions - influence behavior in private and public landowners. This study will develop methods to characterize these social systems and their interactions with the environment, and use this information to explore and test alternative strategies that improve the landscape while minimizing the social and economic costs associated with wildfire.
The Forest-People-Fire project focused on characterizing and understanding the relationships between wildfire, forest stand dynamics, forest harvest/fuels treatment strategies, and human settlement pattern in the wildlands and the wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) in Central Oregon. We explored these relations with a combination of empirical field work and modeling activities that captured the dynamic interactions between human management of the landscape, and the response of the landscape to that management, looking through lenses of 1) risk of human structures to wildfire under current and potential future climatic conditions, 2) ecosystem services in terms of provision of wood, carbon storage, and habitat of a variety of focal wildlife species. We identified the effects of alternative forest extraction, fuels reduction, and land use allocation strategies on the level of risk human settlement structures are likely to experience, the capacity of the forest to provide products for human needs, the resulting structural and demographic qualities of the forest, and the impacts on provision of habitat, carbon storage, and other valued ecosystem services. The project characterized the networks of individuals and groups associated with wildfire management in our study areas to explore how different network types influence the ability to capture resources and influence decision-making around forest management. We found that landowners in central Oregon have very different approaches to fire risk and goals for land management, ranging from suppression of all fires and no use of prescribed fire to restoration of fire regimes and use of prescribed fire. Private landowners risk perception and actions are sensitive to vegetation, wildfire probability and probability of damage, and use of firewise practices by homeowners is sensitive to social network influences. The social network of the region was dense and characterized by two sub-networks that interacted less than would be predicted by chance. One sub-network was related to fire protection (structures) and the other to forest restoration objectivds. Scenario workshops with stakeholders revealed strong socio-economic differences in perspectives across the study area. In natural resource dependent communities, stakeholders focused on alternatives related to increased use or alterative use (biomass) of forests. In amenity-based communities stakeholders developed a wider range of socio-ecological futures included increased collaboration and new economies. All stakeholder groups had strong interest in understanding landscape-level implications of forest management and climate change alternatives and were very interested in applying the Envision model to explore management and policy alternatives. We developed a coupled human and natural systems model for the study area and used it to characterize general forest management scenarios and outcomes. Three likely scenarios were identified with assistance from stakeholders: 1) no forest management, which would occur if supply of wood to mills was not adequate to maintain an economic forest management capacity; 2) current policy; and 3) accelerated restoration, where much larger areas where treated to restore forest structure and reduce loss of values to high severity fires. The accelerated restoration scenario had the lowest amount of high severity fire over the next 50 years and more habitat for western bluebirds, a species that prefers relatively open forests. However, that scenario also reduced carbon storage on the landscape and decreased the amount of habitat for pileated woodpeckers, which favor denser, multi-stored forests. Under a climate change scenario there is a strong likelihood that wildfire will increase in both frequency and intensity in our study area over the next 50 years, and that human settlement patterns that utilize the WUI are likely to be increasingly at risk to exposure to wildfire. However, policy choices related to fuels reduction, harvest management, and land development can play a significant role in determining the level of exposure to risk and the production of valued ecosystem services. Fuels reduction strategies, though effective locally at reducing fire risk, would require substantially larger future investment to achieve sufficient coverage on the landscape to significantly reduce risk of losses to high severity fire. Additionally, we found that regions with well-developed human networks and social capacity around wildfire concerns were more effective at capturing resources, affecting forest management policy, and increasing awareness of wildfire risk and amenity values. We hosted an international workshop of scientists involved in coupled human and natural systems in fire-prone landscapes. We identified key issues and questions and developed a report which identified a maladaptive syndrome related to fire policy that could be better understood through the use of social-ecological systems approaches. We also developed the first rigorous characterization of a coupled-human and natural system for a fire prone landscape, which reveals how positive and negative feedbacks can affect adaptation strategies for fire prone landscapes.
