Abstract
Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical changes to ecosystems, fire danger is increasing, and fires are having increasingly devastating impacts on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services. Increasing fire danger is a vexing problem that requires deep transdisciplinary, trans-sector, and inclusive partnerships to address. Here, we outline barriers and opportunities in the next generation of fire science and provide guidance for investment in future research.We synthesize insights needed to better address the long-standing challenges of innovation across disciplines to (i) promote coordinated research efforts; (ii) embrace different ways of knowing and knowledge generation; (iii) promote exploration of fundamental science; (iv) capitalize on the firehose of data for societal benefit; and (v) integrate human and natural systems into models across multiple scales. Fire science is thus at a critical transitionalmoment.We need to shift fromobservation and modeled representations of varying components of climate, people, vegetation, and fire to more integrative and predictive approaches that support pathways toward mitigating and adapting to our increasingly flammable world, including the utilization of fire for human safety and benefit. Only through overcoming institutional silos and accessing knowledge across diverse communities can we effectively undertake research that improves outcomes in our more fiery future.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | pgac115 |
| Journal | PNAS Nexus |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2022 |
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. This manuscript is a product of discussions at the Wildfire in the Biosphere workshop held in May 2021 funded by the NSF through a contract to KnowInnovation. J.K.S. was supported as part of the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments - Tropics, funded by the US Department of Energy, the Office of Science, the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, and by the NASA Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment grant 80NSSC19M0107. R.T.B. was supported by the NSF grant DEB-1942068. P.E.H. was supported by the NSF grant DEB-1655121. J.K.B. and E.N.S. were supported by CIRES, the University of Colorado Boulder. One cause of current fragmentation within the United States is the narrow focus of major funding sources. Funding currently targets short-term goals, on small, single-Principal Investigator-led research, usually aimed at one aspect of fire science; it should target a holistic reimagination of our relationship with fire entirely, across academic, managerial, and social boundaries. This will create a broader and deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of fire, with less focus on case studies and more focus on case integration. International projects funded by the European Commission have implemented a multi- and interdisciplinary approach, but can still be improved. Support for applied research will be most effective by aiming at both short- and long-term applications and solutions. There are active and prominent discussions on the need to fund fire science across government, local, and Indigenous entities that are all vested in understanding fire. These investments will be critical to advancing our ability to generate new insights into how we live more sustainably with fire. Fire will continue to have enormous societal and ecological impacts, and accelerate feedbacks with climate change over the coming decades. Understanding, mitigating, and managing those impacts will require addressing the presented five challenges to inform how we serve environmental and social justice by sustainably living and interacting with fire in our natural world. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The volume, type, and use of data now available to study fire in the biosphere is greater than ever before—a metaphorical “firehose” delivering vast amounts of information. Multidisciplinary science campaigns to study fire behavior and emissions are data intensive and essential for improving applications from local, regional, to global scales (e.g. ABoVE (), MOYA (), FASMEE (), FIREX-AQ (), MOYA/ZWAMPS (), and WE-CAN ()). Observation networks supported by the US National Science Foundation (e.g. NEON, National Ecological Observatory Network, ) and the Smithsonian sponsored ForestGEO plots (, ) are uniquely valuable for the duration and intensity of data collection. Additionally, there are dozens of public satellites, and even more private ones, orbiting the planet collecting remote-sensing data related to pre-, active, and post-fire conditions and effects, thereby facilitating geospatial analysis from local, to regional, and global scales (, ). Terabases of genome-level molecular data on organisms spanning from microbes to plants and animals are readily generated (). Finally, laboratory, field, and incident data exist like never before, where in the past there was limited availability.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation | 1852977 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | DEB-1655121, 80NSSC19M0107, DEB-1942068 |
| National Center for Atmospheric Research | |
| Office of Science | |
| Biological and Environmental Research | |
| University of Colorado Boulder | |
| Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences | |
| European Commission |
Keywords
- climate change
- resilience
- social-ecological systems
- wildfire
- wildland-urban interface
