Can we stop fires before they start? Researchers are working to predict fire ignitions.

Housing growth is rampant, and much of it occurs in or near wildland vegetation, i.e., in the Wildland Urban Interface or WUI. Such housing growth is bringing homeowners closer to nature, which is great, but also posing numerous environmental problems including changes to fire regimes, introduction of invasive species, more human-wildlife conflicts, and habitat fragmentation.
Can we stop fires before they start? Researchers are working to predict fire ignitions.
Could land use change threaten the US National Wildlife Refuge System? PhD student Chris Hamilton uses cutting-edge technologies to find an answer.
Is zoning an appropriate tool to protect lakes? Van Butsic answered this question for a study region in Northern Wisconsin. He found out that zoning is only effective on lakes with a certain baseline development. One size fits all zoning is ineffective.
Worldwide, intensifying land use is limiting management options inside and out of national parks. Shelley Maxted and others developed a land use monitoring approach and applied it to two parks in the Midwest to assess development pressures. They found considerable changes in road and housing density and landscape fragmentation.
How can we optimize resources to protect houses from fire in America’s Wildland Urban Interface? A team of SILVIS researchers, lead by Avi Bar Massada, is exploring this question.
How important is the past to understand present plant invasions? Gregorio Gavier Pizarro recently found that plant invasions may depend more on historic housing and road patterns than on today’s urban sprawl. To the contrary, contemporary forest fragmentation explained invasions better than fragmentation legacies.