In southern California, we have worked with partners to better characterize the nature of wildfires, with the aim of informing the development of environmentally sensitive but effective fuel management strategies that can deal with projected future increases in fire activity (Keeley et al. 2009, Safford and Van de Water 2014).
In southern California, one of the major issues is balancing the need to protect humans, infrastructure, and sensitive ecosystems from anthropogenic fire while at the same time safeguarding the ability of flammable ecosystems like chaparral to continue to provide important ecosystem services (Underwood et al. 2018a).
Members of the Safford lab and the Ecology Program were co-editors of a book entitled Valuing Chaparral: Ecological, Socioeconomic, and Management Perspectives that was published in early 2018 by Springer. The book includes a number of chapters authored by Safford Lab members.
We have also studied the impacts of fire suppression on chaparral vegetation recovery (Keeley et al. 2005), and we are currently developing a comparative study of high fire frequency impacts on chaparral-type ecosystems in California and southwestern Australia.