Communicating with the public about wildland fire preparation, response, and recovery: a review of recent literature

Abstract

This review paper synthesizes peer-reviewed empirical research published between 2010 and 2021 about wildland fire communication practices. Our goal was to systematically review and provide an overview of how wildland fire communication has been empirically studied, and theoretical and methodological underpinnings and representativeness of this work. We found that researchers employ diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, yet most work originates from the western United States or Australia. Studies were published in diverse disciplinary journals, most frequently looked at residents as study subjects, and many sought to understand the effectiveness of communication. There is a need to build theoretical and methodological consistency in wildland fire communication research.

Acknowledgements

This synthesis was made possible with funding from the Northwest Fire Science Consortium, part of the Joint Fire Science Program Fire Science Exchange Network and the University of Oregon. We thank Autumn Ellison (Oregon State University) for document review and figure layout and design, Casey Davis (Sola Design) for design of Figure 1 and Table 2, and Alison Deak (University of Oregon) for creating an author affiliations database and document review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Defined as “Any non-structure fire that occurs in vegetation or natural fuels” (National Wildfire Coordinating Group Glossary of Wildland Fire, https://www.nwcg.gov/about-the-nwcg-glossary-of-wildland-fire). This includes terms such as wildfire, forest wildfire, and brush fire. We also consider smoke events from wildland fires to be encompassed in our definition of “wildland fire” and its impacts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Joint Fire Science Program’s Northwest Fire Science Consortium, Project ID: 11-S-3-8 and US Forest Service agreement 20-JV-11261957-003.