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Wildfires create damages in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) that total hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the United States. Understanding how fires are produced in built-up areas near and within fire prone landscapes requires evaluating and quantifying the roles that humans play in fire regimes. We outline a typology of wildfire production functions (WPFs) and empirically estimate three broad classes of WPFs: fire event (ignitions), fire aggregate extent, and a combination function of fire effect and aggregate extent (an intensity-weighted aggregate extent model). Our case study is Florida, which contains an abundance of both wildland and human populations. We find that socio-economic variables play statistically significant roles in all three estimated production functions. At the county level, we find that population and poverty are usually positively related to annual wildfire area and intensity-weighted fire area, while unemployment is negatively related to ignitions, area, and intensity-weighted wildfire area. Poverty is found to be negatively related to wildfire ignitions, while the number of police are correlated with fewer ignitions. These results suggest that managers and decision makers should be aware of socio-economic variables and consider them in their wildland fire management decisions in the wildland-urban interface. Our results also emphasize the importance of including such variables in statistical models of wildfire risk in the WUI.
Cataloging Information
- air quality
- burning permits
- catastrophic fires
- climatology
- computer program
- drought
- econometrics
- ENSO - El Nino Southern Oscillation
- fire damage
- fire frequency
- fire hazard reduction
- fire injury
- fire intensity
- fire management
- fire management planning
- fire protection
- fire regimes
- fire size
- fire suppression
- flame length
- Florida
- forest management
- fuel accumulation
- fuel management
- fuel types
- GIS - geographic information system
- human caused fires
- ignition
- incendiary fires
- landscape ecology
- lightning caused fires
- Nyssa aquatica
- population density
- population ecology
- private lands
- production functions
- public information
- riparian habitats
- risk analysis
- SFP - Southern Fire Portal
- slash
- statistical analysis
- swamps
- Taxodium distichum
- US Forest Service
- wetlands
- wildfires
- 01.SRS.A.2
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