Full metadata
Title
Collaborative wildland fire restoration: innovative approaches in Arizona's Sky Islands
Description
Over the last few decades, the western United States has experienced more extreme wildland fire events, remarkable for their size and severity. The frequency, intensity, and size of wildfires is projected to only increase, with severe consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem services, human property, and more broadly, the sustainability of western forests. These trends are the result of a complex suite of factors including, past land-use policies, fire suppression, climate change, and human development. To protect fire-adapted ecosystems from further damage, fuel reduction and fire reintroduction are required over large landscapes, necessitating government agencies, landowners, and other interests to work together. In response, collaborative fire restoration efforts are forming to carry out this much needed work. This research takes a multi-level approach to understanding these new models for fire management and restoration. Collaborative, landscape-level approaches to fire reintroduction are a direct response to a failure in past policies and approaches, which necessitates a discussion of why these policies allowed fires to grow worse and why management failed to effectively prevent this from happening. Thus, a historical analysis of wildland fire policy and management constitutes one layer in this analysis. Collaborative frameworks to wildland fire reintroduction are few and far between, which obliges a discussion of how collaboration works and why it may be necessary. An in-depth case study of FireScape, a collaborative effort in southeastern Arizona to restore wildfire completes this analysis and provides a discussion of the challenges, benefits, and implications of these new approaches. The context for this case study is southeastern Arizona's Sky Islands. The Sky Islands region spans the U.S. Mexico borderlands and is a biodiversity hotspot, making it an ideal place to explore the interactions between humans and natural systems. The more recent emphasis on collaboration in wildfire management has yet to be fully explored in other academic circles. Collaboration is essential in fire restoration and provides one pathway to solve complex natural resource management issues.
Date Created
2012
Contributors
- Raymondi, Ann Marie (Author)
- Hirt, Paul W (Thesis advisor)
- York, Abigail (Thesis advisor)
- Pyne, Stephen J (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
vi, 118 p. : col. ill., col. map
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.15185
Statement of Responsibility
by Ann Marie Raymondi
Description Source
Viewed on Nov. 8, 2012
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: M.A., Arizona State University, 2012
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-118)
Field of study: Sustainability
System Created
- 2012-08-24 06:31:57
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:45:12
- 3 years 2 months ago
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