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U.S. federal agencies and sovereign tribal agencies often work together on shared goals like managing wildfire, improving wildlife habitat and other issues. A new repository collects a number of these co-stewardship - or sovereign-to-sovereign - agreements in an effort to help tribes and others better understand their possible uses.
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A new paper finds that current wildfire suppression policies can increase fire severity as much as decades of fuel accumulation and climate change. Using fire models, the area burned annually grew much faster under current suppression policy when compared to a policy of allowing low- and moderate-intensity blazes to burn.
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The National Firefighter Registry is perhaps the most ambitious effort to better understand the link between firefighting and cancer.
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According to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, there were just five reported abortions in the state in 2023. A sharp decline from previous years, that number does not appear to reflect the reality of abortion access in the state since strict abortion bans went into effect.
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A proposal for a wildlife overpass a few years ago in eastern Idaho has politicized the issue for that region.
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Prescribed fires and mechanical thinning efforts are increasingly common land management tools intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. But research into their long term effectiveness is somewhat limited. A recent study looked at the effects of such interventions over more than 20 years on a dry, low-elevation research forest in Montana, and found that the combination of thinning and burning was the most likely to reduce fire risk.
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A recent paper explored the challenges exacerbated by climate change faced by Latino farmworkers in Idaho, which are comparable to the issues faced by such workers across the West.
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As the name suggests, public lands are everybody’s. But that doesn’t mean that all people feel equally welcome. The Big Gal Backpackers of Boise are one of many groups across the West working to make public land more inviting to people who haven’t always felt welcome.
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The Forest Service’s recently released “Strategy to Expand Prescribed Fire Training in the West” document is blunt: “The prescribed fire implementation environment continues to grow in complexity, IT READS, whereas the ability of practitioners to practice and hone their expertise has lagged, particularly in the Western United States.” The newly established Western Prescribed Fire Training Center is a major effort to address that workforce issue.
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New research shows that “beaver-modified riverscapes” are very resilient to the effects of large wildfires. After burns, the refuge they provide to flora and fauna can also aid in post-fire recovery. That’s why the researchers involved argue that beavers “can be part of a comprehensive fire-mitigation strategy.”