12 research outputs found
Mobilizing through dialogue: building interdisciplinary partnerships among forest health, wildland fire, and public health sectors to find solutions to address the impact of wildland fire smoke on communities
The impact of smoke from wildland fires on communities across the western United States is an interdisciplinary crisis that requires an interdisciplinary solution. There are increasing calls for cross-collaboration between forest, fire, air quality, and public health practitioners to best prepare communities for ever-worsening smoke seasons. However, opportunities to engage interdisciplinary groups of practitioners and stakeholders on this topic have been largely missing. We report on the development and implementation of a hybrid in-person and online workshop that brought together practitioners from Washington State to foster new interdisciplinary relationships and partnerships in order to integrate public health considerations into forest management during and beyond fire season. This workshop highlighted ways in which hybrid workshops can facilitate discussions across traditionally siloed stakeholders to address the community health crisis of wildfire smoke and illuminate tangible steps for further facilitating integrated discussions around a shared area of interest. Key lessons included the importance of introductory meetings for establishing strong collaborations and the strength of hybrid settings for fuller participation by diverse stakeholders. This manuscript outlines ways in which local practitioners from other smoke-impacted communities can begin to build and utilize interdisciplinary partnerships to prepare and adapt for longer and more severe wildland fire smoke seasons
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Restoring fire-prone Inland Pacific landscapes: seven core principles
© 2015 The Author(s) Context: More than a century of forest and fire management of Inland Pacific landscapes has transformed their successional and disturbance dynamics. Regional connectivity of many terrestrial and aquatic habitats is fragmented, flows of some ecological and physical processes have been altered in space and time, and the frequency, size and intensity of many disturbances that configure these habitats have been altered. Current efforts to address these impacts yield a small footprint in comparison to wildfires and insect outbreaks. Moreover, many current projects emphasize thinning and fuels reduction within individual forest stands, while overlooking large-scale habitat connectivity and disturbance flow issues. Methods: We provide a framework for landscape restoration, offering seven principles. We discuss their implication for management, and illustrate their application with examples. Results: Historical forests were spatially heterogeneous at multiple scales. Heterogeneity was the result of variability and interactions among native ecological patterns and processes, including successional and disturbance processes regulated by climatic and topographic drivers. Native flora and fauna were adapted to these conditions, which conferred a measure of resilience to variability in climate and recurrent contagious disturbances. Conclusions: To restore key characteristics of this resilience to current landscapes, planning and management are needed at ecoregion, local landscape, successional patch, and tree neighborhood scales. Restoration that works effectively across ownerships and allocations will require active thinking about landscapes as socio-ecological systems that provide services to people within the finite capacities of ecosystems. We focus attention on landscape-level prescriptions as foundational to restoration planning and execution