Pilot Projects

Contacts: Michal Russo, Paige Fischer, and Heidi Huber-Stearns

The Western wildfire crisis is an intractable challenge - despite investments in scientific research, policy, and management actions, impacts are getting worse. The wildfire community has diverse perspectives about how we got here, why we should care, and what we ought to do about it. That diversity can provide a wider and more comprehensive perspective of wildfire issues, but it can also lead to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and conflict. Whether or not experts agree with those perspectives, when experts dismiss or delegitimize them, they unintentionally make the crisis more intractable.

This research is an investigation of the different ways thought leaders are thinking and talking about the Western wildfire crisis. We conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews with 60 thought leaders to identify the underlying conceptual frames that shape their views about the causes and impacts of western wildfire problems and how society ought to address them. Based on those interviews, and reinforced by published documents, conferences, websites, podcasts, and films, we identified 9 distinct wildfire narratives, or depictions of the Western wildfire crisis. We illustrate these findings as a wheel summarizing key areas of commonality and differences across the narratives. Our findings reveal significant friction driven by the underlying cognitive frames wildfire experts hold. However, the way experts talk about the crisis also reflects a blending across multiple narratives. In other words, experts describe more than one explanation for why we are facing a crisis and what society ought to do about it. This suggests that cultural, disciplinary, and political lines may be blurring, signaling an opportunity for establishing connections across historically divergent communities of practice. Ultimately, gaining a better understanding of the array of Western wildfire narratives may facilitate greater self-reflection and reconciliation in practice.

To learn more about how we constructed the narratives, click here

To learn more about the survey we are conducting, click here

Our aim is to identify the full diversity of individual and organizational actors who are influencing thought on wildfire risk. Our analysis includes qualitative and quantitative research methods including interviews, surveys, and large amounts of text and digital trace data. 

Qualitative Inventory Building 

Contacts: Paige Fischer, Sophie Daudon 

Through website analysis and conversations with key resource and thought leaders from the West, we are developing an inventory of organizations working at the intersection of forests, fires, communities, and climate change. 

“Big Data” Inventory Building

Contact: Fede Holm

The big data approach to governance network analysis involves: 

• Identification of relevant stakeholders via automated web scraping tools gathering large amounts of digital trace data;

• Descriptive and inferential network analysis of the stakeholder network;

• Reconstruction of stakeholders' mental maps associated with complex adaptive systems using publicly available data (newspaper articles, policy-related comments, social media)

Contacts: Paige Fischer, Riva Denny

This research uses wildfire to explore the influence of climate change-related natural hazards on individual risk perceptions and responses. We are conducting longitudinal family forest owner (FFO) surveys across Oregon and Washington State and analyzing responses in conjunction with biophysical data about fire hazard across the region. Our goal is to explore how FFOs’ forest management behavior relates to perceptions of wildfire risk, perceived capacity for responding to those risks, previous wildfire experiences, climate change beliefs, wildfire history and (potentially changing) wildfire conditions in their area.

This research is being conducted in collaboration with Jeff Kline (USFS) as part of the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station’s West-Side Fire Research Initiative.

Watch this webinar to earn about our preliminary findings!

This project aims to better understand opportunities and constraints for coping with and adapting to an increasingly flammable, smokier, and more power-fragile environment in rural communities and small towns in the American West at the individual and household level. Through a multi-site case study, we will conduct semi-structured interviews in three communities in Northern California, in geographic areas with high risk for wildfire, high exposure to wildfire smoke, and high past and potential future power disruptions in the form of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS). In addition to identifying actionable opportunities for and barriers to adaptation, we will also advance a theoretical model of behavioral adaptation.

Sub Objectives

1. Examine how individuals perceive risk and efficacy in response to wildfire risk, smoke, and power disruption.

2. Identify the suite of behavioral adaptation that individuals engage in when responding to wildfire risk, smoke, and power disruption.

3. Document in what ways perceptions of wildfire risk, smoke, and power disruption, and subsequent behaviors/responses interact with one another (and possibly compound).

4. Investigate how social processes and affective responses may shape perceptions and individual behavioral adaptations.

This project focuses on the post-fire recovery of western forests as a response to environmental changes due to climate change and human practices . We will use tools such as remote sensing and climate modeling to characterize environmental conditions pre-and post-fire, and examine the importance of extreme events (particularly prolonged droughts and heatwaves) on forest recovery. We will also look at pre-and post-fire forest management practices, and investigate how different approaches in terms of fire suppression or reforestation strategies can impact recovery time and trajectories. Lastly, we will build a framework of potential forest recovery trajectories in the context of a rapidly-changing climate, which could then be used to inform forest management strategies.

Sub Objectives

1. Examine how forest health and species composition can be impacted as a result of changes in environmental conditions and forest management.

2. Investigate the importance of extreme events such as rainfall variability and heatwaves related to the early stages of forest recovery and replanting efforts.

3. Provide biophysical insights on fire damage and recovery, which could potentially be adapted to inform and impact forest management decisions.

WFFI lead: Heidi Huber-Stearns

This joint research effort is led by partners at Colorado State University, University of Michigan, Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, the Fire Learning Network, and The Ember Alliance.Through the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA), an influx of federal dollars will be made available for fuels projects throughout the country. At the same time, many federal and community-based partners have expressed a need to better understand non-governmental partners’ implementation capacity for prescribed fire work across public, Tribal and private lands, to more strategically direct that investment. There is also an urgent need to better understand the critical challenges these partners face with the loss of prescribed fire insurance products. This survey is designed to collect timely and relevant information that addresses these gaps, focusing on groups that implement prescribed fire across multiple land jurisdictions throughout the U.S. We intend to use these data to inform greater investments of public dollars in local partners, and provide actionable information that will drive solutions to the insurance crisis. We would also like to engage partners in considering how a prescribed fire capacity assessment tool like this might be adopted for future and ongoing use.

Sub Objectives

The partners intend to use this data for research and advocacy related goals, which include:

• Defining the population of partners that implement or support prescribed fire operations in the U.S., and their current capacities;

• Understanding the resource needs of these partners to maintain or build their capacity;

• Understanding how the lack of prescribed fire insurance policies has impacted practitioners, including the scope and spatial scale of the impact across different organizational categories;

• Informing future advocacy work, including efforts to enhance targeted federal investments in local prescribed fire partners.

The goal of this project is to develop models for restituting fire stewardship back to Tribes and elevating Tribal priorities for Native fire stewardship in federal land management. As sovereigns with territorial jurisdiction and treaty rights recognized by the US, Tribal nations are entitled to manage forests for ecosystem services on which Tribes depend. Native fire restitution entails restoring knowledge and rights regarding fire stewardship back to Tribes. Native fire restitution has been recognized as an important strategy for improving management of forests for game and wildlife; protection of forests against fire, insects, diseases, or other destructive agents; and development of sound policies for the management of forest lands for ecological restoration, catastrophe management, climate change adaptation, and improved health. However, models for fire restitution are lacking in the scholarly and policy literatures. Using the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians (Sault Tribe) partnership with the U.S. Forest Service as a starting point, we will investigate cases of successful fire stewardship to develop models to guide restitution of Native fire stewardship and how to elevate it in federal land management processes. 

This project will focus on community based organizations (CBOs) working on disaster resilience in Oregon. Sustainability starts with the individuals within an organization, and with increasing frequency and severity of disasters (wildfires, flooding, smoke events), it is a critical time to understand how to best support the sustainability of organizations helping vulnerable populations from specific cultual communities.  There is a need to understand how CBOs are navigating their own wellness in the midst of the significant crises happening around them, and how are they able maintain continuity for safe spaces for communities while navigating these crises. The United Way of the Columbia Willamette is looking for a team to help support their focus on leading with equity, and engage in a project focused on sustainability and development, environmental justice, policy and planning and behavior, education and communication. This project provides the opportunity to engage with United Way and their networks, to help community-based organizations deal with the need to adapt and transform, in a time of intensifying environmental issues, mainly climate adaptation. 

The project will explore the intersection of climate science and the real-world practices United Way and other CBOs employ, focusing on how they could be adapted for sustainable transitions in supporting workforce wellness in high stress environments, culturally competent and clinically-informed approaches to climate anxiety and displacement, and organization training and resources for trauma informed care. This project seeks an intersectional justice lens on climate vulnerability and adaptation; workforce dynamics; hazard exposure; and community revitalization. 

 In particular, this project will:

1. Inventory existing CBOs working on climate adaptation and disaster resilience (where they are, what they are doing)

2. Identify and synthesize available resources to CBOs and disaster resilience work, focused mainly on research areas that can advance internal and external CBO workforce wellness in this climate adaptation space, such as workforce wellness in high stress environments, culturally responsive      and clinically-informed approaches to climate anxiety and displacement, organization training and resources for trauma informed care. Additionally, explore resources that support workforce wellness across sectors and organizations.

3. Conduct engaged research with identified CBOs to understand how CBOs are navigating their own wellness amid significant disaster crises, what strengths and resources they have,     what needs and gaps they see, and currently practiced culturally responsive strategies to wellness in the workplace. Additionally, to identify how CBOs evaluate the effectiveness of their wellness strategies and the strengths/weaknesses of these evaluations.

4. Link findings from synthesized resources to identified CBO needs through shared learning, potentially some resource creation (e.g. a guide to relevant resources, workforce welless policy review practices, list of best practices etc).

Contacts: Riva Denny, Paige Fischer

This research follows up on a 2008 survey to assess how landowner land use and wildfire risk perceptions have changed over the past 10+ years. By re-surveying the same landowners, we have a rare opportunity to determine how increased climate change hazards (wildfire) are impacting individual behavior and decision-making over time. 

Contact: Tony Gardella 

This research explores how to analyze policy impacts in the complex wildfire challenges we face. Many policies are designed and assessed to understand how they lower wildfire risk. Few are concerned with how costs are distributed. To that end, this project investigates how wildfires costs are distributed and who bears the greatest burden. Using home insurance prices as a case study, the project uses an agent based modelling approach to analyze how insurance costs are distributed amongst homeowners living at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and whether certain demographics are disproportionately burdened with these costs. 

Contact: Paige Fischer

In fall 2021, Paige offered a seminar course for graduate students and University of Michigan faculty to deepen our collective understanding of wildfire risk as an SES. 

See what students learned: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rGEjlvP1nRk-s20vyrl_tY-Ejb0_WxrE?usp=sharing 

Course summary: Within the relatively new field of sustainability science, “social-ecological systems” (SES) frameworks have gained recognition as a tool for understanding how social and ecological forces interact with outcomes that are desired (or not desired) by society. Through analysis of research papers, articles, documentaries, and reports, and discussions with faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and guest speakers working in the fields of forest management, fire protection, community development, and climate change mitigation and adaptation, the course builds understanding of wildfire as an SES and how to manage it as such.