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Our perspectives influence our recognition and assessment of risk. Over the last few decades, the area and frequency of wildfire in the western U.S. has increased dramatically. But relative to what baseline? And how has this potentially influenced our perceptions of wildfire-related risks moving forward? Collaborating with fire ecologist Dr. Larissa Yocom, I recently explored these questions (Murphy et al., Earth's Future, 2018).
Reviewing the last two decades of publications from high-impact journals, I found that the overwhelming majority of wildfire-related literature only presented or discussed wildfire trends since the mid-20th century. This period of time marks an anomalous and artificially low period of wildfire in the American West, due to decades of effective fire suppression. While modern, satellite-derived datasets are the most accurate and may emphasize the influence of climate change on wildfire, this limited perspective gives the media and public the false impression that the area burning by wildfire in the West is "record breaking". Meanwhile, longer-term wildfire studies consistently demonstrate wildfire areas used to be much more extensive during pre-European settlement times. Compounding the issue, most of the water infrastructure in the West was constructed during the quiescent period of wildfire in the mid-20th century. Fires, particularly those that burn at high severity, can cause erosion that produces excessive amounts of sediment. With a limited historical perspective on fire, this indirect wildfire risk has largely been overlooked. This is problematic, especially now that most of our western rivers have been dammed. As wildfire area and severity are on the rise, increasing amounts of post-wildfire sediment will make its way through rivers and into reservoirs, which we rely upon for drinking and agricultural water. Despite this risk, we do not currently have models capable of predicting the risk wildfires pose to downstream water infrastructure. Therefore, I am now leading an NSF-funded project (PIs: Murphy, Belmont & Czuba), where we are working to build a watershed-scale modeling framework capable of evaluating the vulnerability of water supply reservoirs to post-wildfire sedimentation. |
Figure 1 from the open-source article, Murphy et al., Earth's Future, 2018.
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