NC CASC consortium partner, Phil Higuera, University of Montana, is co-author on a new paper, "Developing strategies to support social-ecological resilience in flammable landscapes: A structured approach for natural resource managers and other stakeholders". The paper is a product of the USDA/US Forest Service Joint Fire Science Program.

Land management and fire management goals are increasingly framed in terms of resilience, in part due to the combined impacts of climate change, land-use change, and legacies of land management. Implicit in this framing is the recognition that resilience to wildfire involves both ecological and social dimensions. Discussions surrounding resilience often do not explicitly articulate what resources should or must be resilient to wildfire, and seldom do they make explicit for whom resilience is important. Land managers need to understand and identify which resources their communities want to be resilient to wildfire before they can outline specific actions that could be taken to support resilience for those resources. We detail an approach for bringing together land and resource managers, community institutions, and other stakeholders - those people for whom resilience is important - to achieve these objectives. We describe a series of exercises used for a workshop but present them here in a more generic form that could be adapted to a variety of landscapes, audiences, and formats. Read the full paper.