Science for Healthy Forests
Jack Cohen, Ph.D., Research Physical Scientist, U.S. Forest Service (retired), A More Effective Approach for Preventing Wildland-Urban Fire Disasters, 2022. As indicated by the typical patterns of (wildland-urban) fire destruction, shrub and tree canopies are not spreading high intensity fires through communities. … We can effectively prevent WU fire disasters by reducing home ignitability. By having everyone do so we can protect the community.
Columbia University Climate School & Headwaters Economics, Missing the Mark: Effectiveness and Funding in Community Wildfire Risk Reduction, June 2023. This analysis concludes that the most effective policies for reducing community wildfire risk tend to be those that manage the built environment, including mandated building codes and home hardening. Those policies are also among the least funded or supported.
Garrett W Meigs, Harold S J Zald, John L Campbell, William S Keeton and Robert E Kennedy, Do insect outbreaks reduce the severity of subsequent forest fires?, 2008. In contrast to common assumptions of positive feedbacks, we find that insects generally reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires.
Elizabeth D. Reinhardt, Robert E. Keane, David E. Calkin, Jack D. Cohen, Objectives and considerations for wildland fuel treatment in forested ecosystems of the interior western United States, 2008. There are a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings about fuel treatments and their use as a panacea for fire hazard reduction.
Matthew J. Reilly, et al., Cascadia Burning: The historic, but not historically unprecedented, 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, USA, 2008. Reports from the early 1900s, along with paleo- and dendro-ecological records, indicate similar and potentially even larger wildfires over the past millennium…. Forest management and fuel treatments are unlikely to influence fire severity in the most severe wind-driven fires.