Project Topics

Fire Science Education

As part of the Northwest Fire Science Consortium, we accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science. Learn more about our work with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium (NWFSC).

Monitoring and Assessment

These projects involve systematic, long-term data collection to evaluate how a project (e.g. forest restoration or community resilience efforts) progresses over time. EWP monitors social, ecological, and economic conditions across a range of geographic scales ranging from local monitoring for forest collaboratives to national monitoring of USDA Forest Service activities. These projects help partners improve decision-making and understand outcomes.

Projects

• Westside Ecological Monitoring
• Northwest Forest Plan
• Stewardship Contracting
• Landscape Resiliency Program
• Federal Forest Restoration Program Monitoring for the Oregon Department of Forestry
• Lakeview Collaborative Forest Landscapes Restoration Project Monitoring
• Landscape Evaluations
• Tongass National Forest Social and Economic Monitoring

Wildland Fire Policy and Management

These projects focus on how agencies, community based organizations, and communities and others plan for, use, and respond to wildland fire—including wildfire, prescribed fire, and managed fire. Our work examines how policies, governance structures, and organizational capacities shape decision‑making across jurisdictions and landscapes.

Projects

• Protecting Watershed Function
• Prescribed Fire Policy
• Forest Service's Shared Stewardship Strategy
• Wildfire Resilience
• Managing the Market: How Procurement Practices Impact Sector Wildfire Response Capacity

Smoke and Air Quality

We partner with federal, state, and local organizations to evaluate how smoke management policies are interpreted and implemented, identify barriers and opportunities for expanding the safe and effective use of prescribed and managed fire, and assess how cross‑boundary coordination can better support fire‑adapted landscapes. Our projects also explore how institutional processes evolve as smoke seasons grow longer and more complex. Take a look at our Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice webpage, to see our full program of work. 

Projects

• Air Quality in Oakridge
• Improving Community Decision Making with Assistance Providers in the Pacific Northwest
• Oregon Smoke Communications and Impacts
• West Bend Prescribed Fire After Action Review
• Wildfire Smoke Perception and Response in the Northwestern U.S.

Wildfire and Restoration Workforce

These projects focus on understanding the composition of the workforce and challenges they face working in ecological restoration and wildfire resiliency.

Projects

• Fire Resilience Futures: Workforces, Careers, and Livelihoods in the Western U.S.
• Hands on the Land
• Rocky Mountain Research Station
• Rural Youth Futures

Historical Forest Stewardship

This research asks how traditional management practices such as cultural burning and selective harvesting of natural resources may have contributed to forest health and increased resilience to catastrophic wildfire and changing climate. This research contributes to efforts to improve forest resilience by informing forest planners about how people successfully lived with and managed these same hazards in the past, and by showing how such practices could guide contemporary management practices. It also supports Tribal community efforts to preserve and interpret their cultural heritage, and to re-engage in restoration and stewardship of their traditional lands.

Projects

Co-Producing Fire

Social and Ecological Systems

These projects investigate how people and ecosystems interact across forested landscapes. Past work has examined how resilience is defined and implemented within the Forest Service, how governance systems respond to disturbances like Mountain Pine Beetle outbreaks, and how major restoration initiatives function on the ground. Additional projects analyze community‑based organizations, socioeconomic performance measures, and strategies that strengthen collaboration and local benefits from restoration.

Projects

• Grow Back Better
• Resilience in National Forest Planning
• Mountain Pine Beetle Response
• Forest Service Restoration Strategies
• The Socioeconomic Outcomes of Restoration
• Dry Forest Investment Zone
• Community-Based Organizations, Social Networks, and Conservation: Strategies for Rural Economic Development in the West
• Iconic Places of the U.S. Forest Service
• The Forest Service and Communities