Fire regime change is of increasing concern as global change and management legacies alter the distribution and flammability of fuels. Depending on its characteristics, fire as a disturbance has the potential to alter fundamental characteristics of systems. Resilience quantifies the ability of a system to remain in or return to its current state following disturbance. Because management and use decisions impact resources and ecological processes, social and ecological factors must be evaluated together to predict resilience. We engaged land managers through interviews and surveys to assess social risk and resilience to fire, based on management objectives and practices and organizational constraints and decision-making. We utilized a species distribution modeling framework to project risk and a stepwise logistic regression to project resilience to jurisdictions that did not participate in interviews or respond to surveys. We used previously-published models of fire risk across the landscape, and we harnessed available land-cover, geophysical, biodiversity, and hydrology data to model ecological resilience to fire. We then used spatial modeling to produce combined social-ecological resilience to fire across the non-fire-adapted Sonoran Desert Ecosystem in Arizona.
Results/Conclusions
We found highest fire risk in the central and eastern portions of the study area, where flammable fuels are more consistent and managers reported fewer fire resources. We found lowest fire resilience in the southeastern portion of the study area, where due to combined ecological and social factors, sites were least likely to retain their current characteristics and permit achievement of current management objectives. Incorporating social data altered the spatial distribution of areas of high and low resilience to fire, indicating that management constraints and practices can exacerbate already tenuous ecological conditions. However, analyzing ecological and social characteristics together permits regional managers to predict the effects of changing fire regimes across large, multi-jurisdictional landscapes and to consider where to direct resources.