Papers, Papers Everywhere And Not A Drop Of Ink

Catching up on some future fire reading (or at least downloading)

Oh my God, please, stop! I can’t take it! There are too many papers!!

Pile of books contributed for American soldiers and sailors as part of American Library Association 1917 campaign (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

I just had a browse through some journal alerts I’ve subscribed to, with keywords like wildfire, bushfire and fire management. In just a few months, there must have been at least a thousand papers published. I’ve pasted below those that passed the download threshold and now sit in my overflowing fire references folder. There’s a cool 2,440 items in there as I type.

By comparison there’s about 750 in my reports, proceedings, presentations folder [sometimes quite good stuff, just not in peer reviewed scientific journals], about 250 in my general references folder [mostly climate science here, but only if it doesn’t mention the word fire], about 30 in my lectures & books folder and 209 in my no, even more general than that folder. This latter one includes a fair bit of science policy, the Oreskes, Urai & Kelly and government restructure pieces I’ve mentioned here previously and ones with catchy titles like ‘How to avoid train wrecks when using science in environmental problem solving’, ‘Dictionary of Untranslatables’ [1,339 pages] and ‘Strange Bedfellows: Meditations on the Indispensable Virtues of Confusion, Mindfulness and Humor in the Neuroscientific and Cognitive Study of Esoteric and Contemplative Traditions’.

Sometimes I think I should change careers and just be a synthesis and literature review guy. I mean, seriously, that would be a vital service for both the research and management community, not to mention the general public. There’s too much coming, too fast. I need to stay in my damn lane.

Wildland-urban interface

This is where the people meet the city meets the bush and it’s the topic of a rare wildfire-themed Nature paper (10m global mapping of the WUI, if you please). I reckon Nature wouldn’t publish more than one or two a year on wildfire. If you count the entire Nature stable, then it’s more like 5,000 a year.

• Schug et al. 2023 The global wildland-urban interface

• Modaresi Rad et al. 2023 Human and infrastructure exposure to large wildfires in the United States

• Beltran-Marcos et al. 2023 Wildland-urban interface typologies prone to high severity fires in Spain

Meta-fire management stuff

I am constantly drawn to this area, despite my shameful lack of formal qualifications or capacity. Still mulling over doing some kind of equity and distributional analysis of wildfire management, as recommended by Treasury.

• Schinko et al. 2023 A framework for considering justice aspects of integrated wildfire risk management

• Hamilton et al. 2023 Wildfire risk governance from the bottom up: linking local planning processes in fragmented landscapes

• Holm & Fischer 2023 Combining multiple data sources to identify actor involvement in environmental governance: Wildfire in the American West

• McFayden et al. 2023 A conceptual framework for knowledge exchange in a wildland fire research and practice context

• Ascoli et al. 2023 Fire-smart solutions for sustainable wildfire risk prevention: Bottom-up initiatives meet top-down policies under EU green deal

Fire and its drivers

My roots are in big, impersonal datasets of basic properties of fire and its drivers. I need to keep at least a tiny bit abreast of this stuff.

• Potter & Tannhauser 2023 The relationship between wind speed and satellite measurements of fire radiative power

• Gallo et al. 2023 Evaluation of CMIP6 model performances in simulating fire weather spatiotemporal variability on global and regional scales

• Pais et al. 2023 Global scale coupling of pyromes and fire regimes

• Galizia et al. 2023 Global warming reshapes European pyroregions

Risk modelling

My bread and butter, baby.

• Johnson et al. 2023 Exploring and testing wildfire risk decision-making in the face of deep uncertainty

• Seipp et al. 2023 A multi-benefit framework for funding forest management in fire-driven ecosystems across the Western US

None of the above

But still interesting enough to pass the download test.

• Buettel et al. 2023 Fires in GunaiKurnai Country

• Bowman et al. 2023 Wildfire national carbon accounting: how natural and anthropogenic landscape fires emissions are treated in the 2020 Australian government greenhouse gas accounts report to the UNFCC

• Santin et al 2023 Searching the flames: Trends in global and regional public interest in wildfires

• Lambrou et al. 2023 Social drivers of vulnerability to wildfire disasters: A review of the literature