What are Emerging Needs?
JFSP solicits proposals annually on emerging science need identified by the fire science and management community.
Topics are interdisciplinary and include but are not limited to, fuel treatment effectiveness, fire history, smoke science,
firefighter safety and more. Funded projects include research on evaluating treatment techniques for cost effectiveness,
ecological consequences, and air quality impacts, sequencing of treatments, monitoring and fuels treatment evaluation and
protocols, remote sensing, post-fire stabilization and rehabilitation, firefighter safety and more.
Click here to learn more about Ongoing and Completed Research.
Examples of JFSP Funded Research Findings
Advances in Wildland Firefighter Safety
Safety of wildland firefighters in operations remains a top priority. JFSP has funded numerous research on entrapment avoidance,
fatality conditions and numerous topics of utmost important to the wildland fire community. Important research final reports are below –
- Research needs assessment for wildland firefighter safety (Link)
- Predicting firefighter fatality conditions (Link)
- Classifying firefighter entrapments (Link)
- Firefighter escape route index (Link)
- Characterization of firefighter safety zone effectiveness (Link)
- Impact of slope and wind on firefighter safety zone effectiveness (Link)
Co-managing Risk
Final Report
In FY 2017 JFSP solicited proposals to investigate the social dimensions of co-managing wildfire risk across jurisdictional boundaries.
Two interdisciplinary teams released researched findings on the concept of co-management of risk in December 2021.
Emily Jane Davis and team examined the concept of co-managing risk, in particular, connectivity across wildfire risk mitigation and
fire response in the intermountain west. Given various administrative challenges and views on wildfire suppression, there is a need for
a more cohesive approach to managing wildfire risk it the western US.
The team's findings include:
Case studies and key characteristics of the firesheds studied in Davis and team’s project.
- Collective action to reduce wildfire risk is challenged by multiple types of boundaries, as well as a fluidity of framings of wildfire
risk across social domains and boundary objects, creating some disconnection between how risks are defined and their potential solutions
- Multiple forms of boundary spanning actors, functions, and features are needed to overcome these boundaries and disconnects.
Community-based and collaborative coalitions are key boundary spanning organizations that can unite actors across organizational boundaries
- The practices of prescribed fire and managing wildfire for natural resource objectives help span the boundaries between the functional
realms of mitigation and fire response.
- Research suggests the need for further investment in boundary spanning actors and functions at local scales, coordinated with
efforts to align risk paradigms in broader-level venues; and future applied social science that can continue to identify strategic boundary
spanning approaches in varying contexts.
In another co-management study, Branda Nowell (North Carolina State University) and Toddi Steelman (Duke University) released five noteworthy findings on how
to govern and manage across jurisdictionally fragmented landscapes to promote more effective wildfire preparedness and response. Their findings include:
- Stakeholders varied in the weight they placed on perceptions and management of immediate and tactical risk relative to incident-level potential risks
and long term risks post incident. Minimizing risk in one temporal phase often necessitates accepting greater risk in another phase.
- Operationally, leaders subscribe to different mental models for undertaking co-management. The implication is that different leaders will enter
into conversations about co-management with different expectations, preferences, and assumptions. Making these assumptions more explicit will be
important to effectively manage interdependency in interjurisdictional wildfire response.
- Governance structures for co-managing multiple jurisdictions on wildfires are varied and include ad hoc arrangements, unified command and delegations
of authority. Ad hoc arrangements were most problematic for providing voice in decision making. New governance arrangements may be needed as
fire organizations grow more complex over time with the growth of wildfire size and jurisdictional participation.
- Facilitating better co-management outcomes was possible when two conditions were met: 1) neighboring jurisdictions were involved in decision making
and felt they had a voice and/or 2) neighboring jurisdictions felt confident that the risk management process was appropriate and took their concerns into account.
- Wildfires in the United States have become more institutionally complex over the past 20 years in at least three ways: 1) larger fire perimeters,
2) greater number of incident days at heightened preparedness levels, and 3) more jurisdictions across more levels of government affected on an average incident.
Access the Final Report here
Conceptual Model of Co-Management Processes, Structures, and Outcomes
