Wildland–Urban Interface Residents’ Relationships with Wildfire: Variation Within and Across Communities

Abstract

Social science offers rich descriptions of relationships between wildland–urban interface residents and wildfire, but syntheses across different contexts might gloss over important differences. We investigate the potential extent of such differences using data collected consistently in sixty-eight Colorado communities and hierarchical modeling. We find substantial variation across responses for all considered measures, much of which occurs at the community-level. Our results show that many aspects of relationships with wildfire meaningfully differ both within and across communities. Our analysis suggests that some wildfire social science results will be relatively consistent across communities, whereas others will not, and this study contributes evidence to broader efforts for understanding which is which. As such, it provides important guidance for transferring the lessons of wildfire social science studies across contexts, and for practitioners who seek to understand the breadth of viewpoints within the communities with which they work.

Keywords:

• Community variation
• hazards
• multi-scale analysis
• quantitative models
• wildfire
• wildland–urban interface

Acknowledgments

We thank West Region Wildfire Council and FireWise of Southwest Colorado for providing survey and assessment data. This manuscript was improved by constructive comments provided by Dan Williams (Rocky Mountain Research Station) and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/strategy/documents/strategy/communications/NationalCSWFMSbrochure.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This project was made possible by a grant from the Joint Fire Sciences Program [14-2-01-31].