Treesearch

Fifty years of scientific literature on human behavior, communication and organizations offers numerous insights into the communication and use of science in the context of public land management. Using diverse but complementary social science theories and methods, I studied individual and organizational influences on the use of science by federal fire managers and decision-makers. Results supported the Technology Acceptance Model by showing individual beliefs about research usefulness to be better predictors of use than beliefs about ease of use. Overall, individual beliefs and attitudes...

Studies of science communication and use in the fire management community suggest manager's access research via informal information networks and that these networks vary by both agency and position. We used a phone survey followed by traditional statistical analyses to understand the informal social networks of fire professionals in two western regions of the United States (Northern Rockies and Southwest). In these regions, we sampled federal and tribal decision-makers, fire management officers, fire ecologists and fuels specialists to determine 1) who they go to for scientific information...

This incident is effectively two studies. The first study, and the reason the Serious Accident Investigation Team was assembled, was due to a fatality, which the autopsy later determined to have been caused by a heart attack. The team was not aware of the cause of death for over 4 weeks after the incident occurred. However, the observed and reported cases of heat stress symptoms, on the part of surviving members of the crew, made it necessary to fully explore the conditions surrounding heat illness. The second study was driven by the potential for additional loss of life, which existed in...

Emotional intelligence has been a hot topic in leadership training since Dan Goleman published his book on the subject in 1995. Emotional intelligence competencies are typically focused on recognition and regulation of emotions in one's self and social situations, yielding four categories: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. Recent research in affective neuroscience is making a distinction between emotions and feelings, with emotions playing out in the theater of the body and feelings playing out in the theater of the mind.

The purpose of this report is to present the facts proximal to the accident and share the Team's analysis in a way that enhances the reliability and resilience of Federal, State, and Local wildland fire organizations. The intent is to spur discussion and learning for those in the fire and safety community at all levels.

This study examined the effects of organizational, environmental, group and individual characteristics on five components of safety climate in the US federal fire management community (HRO Practices, Leadership, Group Culture, Learning Orientation and Mission Clarity). Multiple analyses of variance revealed that all types of characteristics had a significant effect on one or more of the five components. Of particular interest was the effect of agency affiliation (an organizational characteristic), in that respondents from the National Park Service (NPS) scored significantly lower than...

In 2009, the federal Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) initiated a national network of regional fire science consortia to accelerate awareness, understanding and use of wildland fire science. This presentation synthesizes findings from initial needs assessments conducted by consortia in eight regions of the United States. The assessments evaluated how fire science is accessed and used in each region, barriers to its use, types of information needed and potential roles for the new consortia through in-person interviews, focus groups and on-line surveys of federal, state, and local fire...

Since emerging in the late 1980s, the paradigm of High Reliability Organizing (HRO) has sought to describe how and why certain organizations consistently function safely under hazardous conditions. Researchers have explored a variety of industrial situations, from the early observations of nuclear aircraft carrier operations to nursing units and even high-tech IPOs. The bulk of this research has been descriptive rather than comparative or predictive. Still, or perhaps because of this, there has been a robust and enriching academic discussion through which the paradigm has been refined and...

When unexpected outcomes occur in wildland fire, reports from incident reviews carry a symbolic value beyond the factual information they contain. Popular perception of incident reviews is that the organization has identified the root cause with an eye toward system change, and that the final report chronicles "the" final, definitive, and authoritative version of events. However, participant comments from a series of dialogue sessions on Learning from Escaped Prescribed Reviews reveal that authors, subjects and readers of reports engage in a much more complex process of audience analysis...

We report daily time series models containing both temporal and spatiotemporal lags, which are applied to forecasting intentional wildfires in Galicia, Spain. Models are estimated independently for each of the 19 forest districts in Galicia using a 1999–2003 training dataset and evaluated out-of-sample with a 2004–06 dataset. Poisson autoregressive models of order P – PAR(P) models – significantly out-perform competing alternative models over both in-sample and out-of-sample datasets, reducing out-of-sample root-mean-squared errors by an average of 15%. PAR(P) and static Poisson models...