Social interactions are widely recognized as a potential influence on risk-related behaviors.We present a mediation model in which social interactions (classified as formal= informal and generic=fire-specific) are associated with beliefs about wildfire risk and mitigation options, which in turn shape wildfire mitigation behaviors. We test this model using survey data from fire-prone areas of Co...

Introduction Wildfires occur annually in Oregon, and the health risks of wildfire smoke are well documented1. Before implementing syndromic surveillance through Oregon ESSENCE, assessing the health effects of wildfires in real time was very challenging. Summer 2015 marked the first wildfire season with 60 of 60 eligible Oregon emergency departments (EDs) reporting to ESSENCE. The Oregon ESSENCE...

Wildfire ignitions are caused by lightning or a variety of human-related activities. While lightning is the most prevalent ignition source across much of the western United States, human-caused ignitions start the majority of fires in the South and nationwide. The frequency of natural and human-caused wildfires varies significantly according to different biophysical, social, and fire management...

Controlling wildfire suppression expenditures has become a major public policy concern in the United States. However, most policy remedies have focused on the biophysical determinants of suppression costs: fuel loads and weather, for example. We show that two non-biophysical variables—newspaper coverage and political pressure—have a significant effect on wildfire suppression costs. Hausman test...

Population growth in the wildland urban interface (WUI) has put a greater number of houses at risk due to wildfire while often straining the resources of fire suppression agencies and contributing to a dramatic increase in wildfire suppression expenditures. In light of these facts, this paper analyzes the consequences of the public provision of fire suppression in a monocentric city where wildf...

General Comment: This paper describes the effect of wildfire particulate matter on air quality over a large part of Europe in 2003. It uses MODIS daily smoke emission inventory and a simple parameterization of injection altitude to prescribe the wildfire emissions in a meso-scale chemistry transport model. The authors conclude that the wildfire resulted in a significant enhancement of PM10 grou...

This review study synthesizes available literature in epidemiology, economics and wildfirerelated studies to provide essential information for the valuation of health costs associated with wildfire events. We review three areas within these literatures: key health outcomes to be evaluated, association between wildfire smoke and health outcomes, and valuation of health effects. We find that the ...

The introduction or modification of land use regulations and sustainability initiatives over the last few decades has arguably increased the complexity of forest planning processes. Given the planning goals of a land management organization, both spatial and temporal characteristics of desired future landscapes may now be important to recognize. In some cases of planning, wildfire plays an impo...

We present a spatially explicit Landscape Fire-Succession Model (LFSM) developed to represent Mediterranean Basin landscapes and capable of integrating modules and functions that explicitly represent human activity. Plant-functional types are used to represent spatial and temporal competition for resources (water and light) in a rule-based modelling framework. Vegetation dynamics are represente...

The goal of this paper is to analyze the effect of wildfire hazard risk on residential housing prices in Colorado Springs, Colorado. How does the risk of wildfire impact transaction values, and do buyers and sellers in the residential housing market accurately capitalize their perception of low probability events such as wildfires into the price of a house? Working within the hedonic property m...