This project seeks to increase resilience to wildfire hazards by modeling and mapping community and ecosystem service vulnerability to wildfire. The hazards of wildfire have increased significantly over time as a function of communities expanding into more rural areas adjacent to the urban interface and the increasing prevalence of conditions for large and rapid wildfire growth. Both initial wildfire events and the post-fire floods and landslides that often follow them are considerable threats to the growing population in fire-prone environments, the infrastructure associated with that populace, and the ecosystem services it relies upon, such as clean water or an economic base such as timber or tourism. However, the manner in which other environmental factors, such as drought and bark beetle outbreaks in forests, contribute to wildfire spread and the potential for post-fire flooding is poorly understood and not currently modeled in an integrated way that supports policy development and community adaptation planning. This project focuses on the Pacific Northwest region to develop a fire component to the existing BioEarth model that will improve our understanding of factors that contribute to wildfires becoming disasters, and prioritizes stakeholder and involvement and public engagement to identify management actions that will increase adaptive capacity and overcome social and political barriers.
Although periodic wildfires are important for a healthy ecosystem, a combination of biophysical and socioeconomic factors can turn a fire into a disaster, with negative impacts in socioecological contexts. These impacts can last for decades, and can include increased vulnerability to subsequent, cascading hazards such as flooding, landslides, and the potential for local to regional economic collapse. Increasing community resilience to these compounding, wildfire-related disasters requires specific attention to social, economic, political, and environmental dynamics at spatial scales ranging from local to national and at temporal scales ranging from minutes to multiple decades. There is a growing understanding of isolated interactions between fire, climate, ecosystem structure and function, forest management activities, and their impacts at multiple scales. The complex and dynamic coupling of these interactions into an integrated human-natural systems model that includes links to policy, resource management, and adaptive capacity, however, is poorly understood. This lack of synthesis limits wildfire resilience in the context of a changing global environment. The overarching goal of this project is to support policy and other decision-making processes at local, regional, and national scales to reduce the risk of wildfire becoming a disaster and increase community and ecological adaptive capacities. This will be done by 1) advancing the understanding of wildfire risk and associated impacts in the context of interactions between regional climate and other forest ecosystem perturbations (e.g., drought in future climates, insect outbreak, and a history of fire management) through new developments in integrated environmental modeling, 2) improving the ability to assess and predict vulnerability and resilience to wildfire using a scalable regional approach, and 3) coordinating with a stakeholder advisory group to develop a decision support system for providing spatially-explicit feasible actions to increase local, regional, and national wildfire resilience.
