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1. Impacts of climate change on land management and wildland fire smoke in the Southeastern United States

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/addbf5  

   Johnson, Megan M; Garcia-Menendez, Fernando (June 2025, Environmental Research Letters)

   Although prescribed fire is frequently used in the Southeastern United States, land managers in the region and across the country plan to expand burning to mitigate wildfire and achieve other ecological goals. However, smoke management is often considered a barrier to prescribed fire. Additionally, climate change will likely affect the frequency of acceptable meteorological conditions for prescribed burning, potentially restricting the use of the practice. Here, we examine the air quality impacts from prescribed fire and wildfire in the Southeastern U.S., the populations affected by smoke in the region, and how these impacts may change under climate change. We rely on projections of wildfire burn area and climate-driven shifts in the frequency of meteorological conditions adequate for prescribed burning, as well as a survey of Southeastern land managers investigating their anticipated response to these changes. Based on this information, we use chemical transport modeling to assess the contributions of wildfire and prescribed fire to air pollution, and project how smoke impacts may vary due to climate change and different land manager responses. We find that prescribed fire is responsible for a significant fraction of regional particulate matter pollution. Populations exposed to the most smoke tend to have higher fractions of people of color and low income. Depending on how land managers respond to changes in atmospheric conditions under climate change, prescribed fire smoke may decrease slightly in the areas with the heaviest burning or increase across much of the Southeast. Projections also show that climate-driven changes in wildfire and prescribed burning may impact compliance with recently updated air quality standards. The analysis assesses the potential consequences of climate change on air pollution over a region in which wildland fire is extensively managed, providing insight into land management strategies that call for increased application of prescribed fire. 

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2. High-severity wildfire potential – associating meteorology, climate, resource demand and wildfire activity with preparedness levels

   https://doi.org/10.1071/WF20066  

   Cullen, Alison C.; Axe, Travis; Podschwit, Harry (January 2021, International Journal of Wildland Fire)

   null (Ed.)

   National and regional preparedness level (PL) designations support decisions about wildfire risk management. Such decisions occur across the fire season and influence pre-positioning of resources in areas of greatest fire potential, recall of personnel from off-duty status, requests for back-up resources from other areas, responses to requests to share resources with other regions during fire events, and decisions about fuel treatment and risk reduction, such as prescribed burning. In this paper, we assess the association between PLs assigned at national and regional (Northwest) scales and a set of predictors including meteorological and climate variables, wildfire activity and the mobilisation and allocation levels of fire suppression resources. To better understand the implicit weighting applied to these factors in setting PLs, we discern the qualitative and quantitative factors associated with PL designations by statistical analysis of the historical record of PLs across a range of conditions. Our analysis constitutes an important step towards efforts to forecast PLs and to support the future projection and anticipation of firefighting resource demand, thereby aiding wildfire risk management, planning and preparedness. 

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3. Facilitating Prescribed Fire in Northern California through Indigenous Governance and Interagency Partnerships

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fire4030037  

   Marks-Block, Tony; Tripp, William (September 2021, Fire)

   Prescribed burning by Indigenous people was once ubiquitous throughout California. Settler colonialism brought immense investments in fire suppression by the United States Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE) to protect timber and structures, effectively limiting prescribed burning in California. Despite this, fire-dependent American Indian communities such as the Karuk and Yurok peoples, stalwartly advocate for expanding prescribed burning as a part of their efforts to revitalize their culture and sovereignty. To examine the political ecology of prescribed burning in Northern California, we coupled participant observation of prescribed burning in Karuk and Yurok territories (2015–2019) with 75 surveys and 18 interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire managers to identify political structures and material conditions that facilitate and constrain prescribed fire expansion. Managers report that interagency partnerships have provided supplemental funding and personnel to enable burning, and that decentralized prescribed burn associations facilitate prescribed fire. However, land dispossession and centralized state regulations undermine Indigenous and local fire governance. Excessive investment in suppression and the underfunding of prescribed fire produces a scarcity of personnel to implement and plan burns. Where Tribes and local communities have established burning infrastructure, authorities should consider the devolution of decision-making and land repatriation to accelerate prescribed fire expansion. 

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4. Characterizing Risks for Wildfires and Prescribed Fires in the Great Plains

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fire8060235  

   Liu, Z; Okafor, IO; George, MB (June 2025, Fire)

   GrantWilliamson (Ed.)

   Increasing wildfire activities across the Great Plains has raised concerns about the effectiveness and safety of prescribed fire as a land management tool. This study analyzes wildfire records from 1992 to 2020 to assess spatiotemporal patterns in wildfire risk and evaluate the role of prescribed fires through the combined analysis of wildfire and prescribed fire data. Results show a threefold increase in both wildfire frequency and area burned, with fire size increasing from east to west and frequency rising from north to south. Wildfire seasons are gradually occurring earlier due to climate change. Negative correlation between prescribed fires in spring and wildfires in summer indicated the effectiveness of prescribed fire in mitigating wildfire risk. Drought severity accounted for 51% of the interannual variability in area burned, while grass curing accounted for 60% of monthly variability of wildfires in grasslands. The ratio of wildfire area burned to total area burned (dominated by prescribed fires) declined from over 20% in early March to below 1% by early April. The results will lay a foundation for the development of a localized fire risk assessment tool that integrates various long-term, mid-term, and short-term risk factors, and support more effective fire management in this region. 

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5. Decision Support for Landscapes with High Fire Hazard and Competing Values at Risk: The Upper Wenatchee Pilot Project

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fire7030077  

   Skinner, Haley K; Prichard, Susan J; Cullen, Alison C (March 2024, Fire)

   Background: Climate change is a strong contributing factor in the lengthening and intensification of wildfire seasons, with warmer and often drier conditions associated with increasingly severe impacts. Land managers are faced with challenging decisions about how to manage forests, minimize risk of extreme wildfire, and balance competing values at risk, including communities, habitat, air quality, surface drinking water, recreation, and infrastructure. Aims: We propose that land managers use decision analytic frameworks to complement existing decision support systems such as the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System. Methods: We apply this approach to a fire-prone landscape in eastern Washington State under two proposed landscape treatment alternatives. Through stakeholder engagement, a quantitative wildfire risk assessment, and translating results into probabilistic descriptions of wildfire occurrence (burn probability) and intensity (conditional flame length), we construct a decision tree to explicitly evaluate tradeoffs of treatment alternative outcomes. Key Results: We find that while there are slightly more effective localized benefits for treatments involving thinning and prescribed burning, neither of the UWPP’s proposed alternatives are more likely to meaningfully minimize the risk of wildfire impacts at the landscape level. Conclusions: This case study demonstrates that a quantitatively informed decision analytic framework can improve land managers’ ability to effectively and explicitly evaluate tradeoffs between treatment alternatives. 

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