Boundary-Spanning Collective Action Assuages Wildfire Risk in the West

Summary: Boundary-spanning collective action assuages wildfire risk, according to a TREE Fund and Utah State University Forestry Extension webinar Feb. 25, 2020.

TREE Fund Learn at Lunch webinar Tuesday, Feb. 25, contextualized the SCOPA model with wildfire risk management: SoRock Fire Science @SRfirescience, via Twitter Feb. 26, 2020

Boundary-spanning collective action appears second, Feb. 25, as Boundary-Spanning for Collective Action: Managing Wildfire Risk in the West, in TREE Fund and Utah State University Forestry Extension 2020 Learn at Lunch webinars.

Emily Jane Davis, Oregon State University Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in Corvallis, bears as learning objectives recognizing and applying boundary-spanning collective action types and functions. Boundary-spanning collective action convenes diverse organizational cultures, incentives, mandates, missions, practices, processes and structures and covers more acreage timely despite capacity, money, ownership and technology-constrained timelines. Boundary-spanning attributes demonstrate the SCOPA model of driver/enabler-friendly settings; common conceptual meanings and goals; gap-bridging, resource-transferring objects; connection-creating and sustaining people/organizations; and activities driving collective/related tasks.

Large, recent fires in large landscapes express the boundary-spanning collective action of multi-agency collaborations, partnerships and responses despite variable ownership patterns, socio-ecological contexts and spatial footprints.

Tony Cheng, Colorado State University Department of Forest & Rangeland Stewardship Professor with an Extension appointment, features case studies managing large, severe wildfires for water supplies.

The Director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute in Fort Collins gauges focus-event settings as generating new or reworked assessment, mapping, monitoring, operational delineation, prescriptive activities. Focus-event settings, such as large, water-needy wildfires harvest such boundary-spanning concepts as preventative mitigation investments, responsibilities and risks; and boundary-spanning objects as shared commitments and vision. Boundary-spanning objects and people/organizations include water protection and wildfire mitigation/suppression collaborative agreements, charters, memoranda of understanding (MoUs) and plans; and fireshed coalitions and water protection partnerships.

Fatigue; gravitational pull of home organization incentives, missions, performance, priorities and targets; individual non-institutionalized risk-takers; and inter-organizational competition for limited grant funding jeopardize boundary-spanning collective action.

The 8,500-square-mile (22,014.9-square-kilometer) setting of Garfield County and Iron County in southwestern Utah kindles the third segment on boundary-spanning collective action, Case Studies on Co-Managing Suppression.

Darren McAvoy, Utah State University Extension Assistant Professor of Forestry in Logan, lauds Color Country Interagency Fire Center dialogue-friendly, relationship-friendly monthly meetings and diverse agency-experienced personnel. Off-season, pre-season planning for co-managing suppression mitigates the facilitating and limiting factors of low turnover whereby new-hire and old-hire procedures must merge for boundary-spanning collective action. Different suppression mandates within agencies in the mixed jurisdictions of southwestern Utah number among the limiting factors to boundary-spanning collective action of shared costs and risks.

Established statutory rules and organizational turnover and, for institutional memories, off-season, pre-season shared artifacts, details, dialogues, maps and memos respectively obstruct and occasion boundary-spanning collective action.

The second Davis segment, as the hour-long webinar's finale, presents positive outcomes with reduced liability in non-profit, rancher-engaged, rapid-reacting, safe-responding, volunteer Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPAs).

Bureau of Land Management and Harney County Wildfire Collaborative suppression management training, mitigation mapping, strategic fuel-break analysis, written agreements and monitoring plans quicken boundary-spanning collective action. Oregon statutes recognize Burns Interagency Fire Zone, Cooperative Extension, High Desert Partnership, RFPA settings; megafire concepts; objectified Bureau-Collaborative MoUs; High Desert Partnership people/organizations; and landscape, project risk-monitoring activities. Webinar viewers selected from large settings; restoration concepts; objectified agreements, codes, MoUs; coordinating, liaising parleyers; and coordinated, outcome-oriented, shared activities people/organizations as boundary-spanning initiators and sustainers.

The Davis segment transmits the SCOPA model for collective action that tackles wildfire risk in the West and various wildfire risk arboriculture and forestry contexts worldwide.

In TREE Fund Learn at Lunch's Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, webinar, Darren McAvoy, Utah State University Extension Assistant Professor of Forestry in Logan, Utah, cited Color Country Interagency Fire Center (CCIFC) for finessing boundary-spanning collective action via such co-managing suppression measures as off-season, pre-season planning; CCIFC is an interagency dispatch center involving cooperation among the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the State of Utah Forestry. Fire and State Lands: via GACC (Geographic Area Coordination Centers) NIFC (National Interagency Fire Center)

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

TREE Fund Learn at Lunch webinar Tuesday, Feb. 25, contextualized the SCOPA model with wildfire risk management: SoRock Fire Science @SRfirescience, via Twitter Feb. 26, 2020, @ https://twitter.com/SRfirescience/status/1232705731238952960

In TREE Fund Learn at Lunch's Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, webinar, Darren McAvoy, Utah State University Extension Assistant Professor of Forestry in Logan, Utah, cited Color Country Interagency Fire Center (CCIFC) for finessing boundary-spanning collective action via such co-managing suppression measures as off-season, pre-season planning; CCIFC is an interagency dispatch center involving cooperation among the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the State of Utah Forestry. Fire and State Lands: via GACC (Geographic Area Coordination Centers) NIFC (National Interagency Fire Center) @ https://gacc.nifc.gov/gbcc/dispatch/ut-cdc/cdcmain.html

For further information:

Abrams, Jesse; Katherine Wollstein; & Emily Jane Davis. June 2018. "State Lines, Fire Lines, and Lines of Authority: Rangeland Fire Management and Bottom-Up Cooperative Federalism." Land Use Policy 75: 252-259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.03.038
Available @ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837718300103

Davis, Emily Jane; Lee K. Cerveny; Donald R. Ulrich; & Meagan L. Nuss. 2018. "Making and Breaking Trust in Forest Collaborative Groups." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations Special Issue: The American West After the Timber Wars 1(40): 211-231.
Available @ https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=hjsr

Davis, Emily Jane; Tony Cheng; and Darren McAvoy. 25 February 2020. "Boundary-Spanning for Collective Action: Managing Wildfire Risk in the West." Utah State University Forestry Extension > Webinars > Archived Webinars > 2020. PA-20-541.
Available @ https://forestry.usu.edu/webinars/index
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCAudaUiJCY&feature=youtu.be

Kratsch, Heidi. 3 December 2019. "Practical Aspects of Tree Selection for High Desert Climates." Utah State University Forestry Extension > Webinars > Archived Webinars > 2019.
Available @ https://forestry.usu.edu/webinars/index

Marriner, Derdriu. 25 January 2020. "Soil Assessment for Urban Trees Aims, Assesses, Acts, Analyzes." Earth and Space News. Saturday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2020/01/soil-assessment-for-urban-trees-aims.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 28 December 2019. "High Desert Tree Selection Attacks Drought, Pollution, Salt and Toxins." Earth and Space News. Saturday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2019/12/high-desert-tree-selection-attacks.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 21 December 2019. "Urban Trees Advocate for Human and Urban Health and Vice Versa." Earth and Space News. Saturday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2019/12/urban-trees-advocate-for-human-and.html

Scharenbroch, Bryant C. 14 January 2020. "Soil Assessment for Urban Trees." Utah State University Forestry Extension > Webinars > Archived Webinars > 2019 > PP-20-003.
Available @ https://forestry.usu.edu/webinars/index

SoRock Fire Science @SRfirescience. 26 February 2020. "Check out this webinar from yesterday - Boundary-Spanning for Collective Action: Managing Wildfire Risk in the West. https://youtu.be/ZCAudaUiJCY. Features the new SCOPA Model 'Settings, Concepts, Objects, People, Activities' for organizing risk management!!" Twitter.
Available @ https://twitter.com/SRfirescience/status/1232705731238952960

White, E.M.; K. Lindberg; E.J. Davis; & T.A. Spies. 2019. "Use of Science and Modeling by Practitioners in Landscape-Scale Management Decisions." Journal of Forestry 117(3): 267-279. https://doi.org/10.1093/jofore/fvz007
Available @ https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/journals/pnw_2019_white001.pdf

Wolf, Kathleen. 19 November 2019. "Health Benefits of City Trees: Research Evidence and Economic Values." Utah State University Forestry Extension > Webinars > Archived Webinars > 2019.
Available @ https://forestry.usu.edu/webinars/index