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The Western Regional Air Partnership (WRAP) has developed a modeling platform to simulate the formation of haze-causing particles that impact federally-protected lands in the western United States. To assist state air quality planners in determining which emission sources are likely candidates for future mitigation, several source apportionment scenarios were evaluated, and two sets of results for the year 2028 are presented here: 1) a "high-level important regional sources" version, with broad emission categories (i.e. U.S. anthropogenic, international anthropogenic, natural, and fires), and 2) a "low-level anthropogenic emission sources within individual states" version, which refines the U.S. anthropogenic contribution to specific emission sectors within individual WRAP region states. Eight examples are discussed, which reflect the variation in source apportionment results at national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges in the western U.S. and suggest which emission sectors are candidates for mitigation to improve future visibility. In 2028, the contribution of domestic anthropogenic emissions at the eight sites ranges from 17% to 58%, with significant impacts from oil and gas production, fossil fuel electric generation, and federally-regulated mobile sources. The contribution from international anthropogenic sources can also be considerable, and ranges from 17% to 43%. Most sectors that are emitting sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), which are the two most likely particle precursors to be curtailed in the states' Regional Haze plans, are declining. For example, in the 13 contiguous WRAP region states, NOx emissions from on-road mobile sources and electric generating units (EGUs) declined by 738 kton/yr (29% decrease) and 65 kton/yr (31% decrease), respectively, in 2028 as compared to current emission estimates, and SO2 emissions from EGUs declined by 42 kton/yr (29% decrease). NOx emissions from oil and gas development also declined by 25 kton/yr (9% decrease) but rose for SO2 emissions by 12 kton/yr (20% increase). Implications: The goal of the Regional Haze Rule (RHR) is to improve visibility at federally-protected areas, and to eventually arrive at natural conditions by the year 2064. Source apportionment tools within regional air quality models are useful for identifying which emission regions and sectors are contributing to haze-causing particles and can indicate to air quality planners where additional emission controls may be warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wildland–urban interface (WUI) is the focus of many important land management issues, such as wildfire, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and human–wildlife conflicts. Wildfire is an especially critical issue, because housing growth in the WUI increases wildfire ignitions and the number of homes at risk. Identifying the WUI is important for assessing and mitigating impacts of development on wildlands and for protecting homes from natural hazards, but data on housing development for large areas are often coarse. We created new WUI maps for the conterminous United States based on 125 million individual building locations, offering higher spatial precision compared to existing maps based on U.S. census housing data. Building point locations were based on a building footprint data set from Microsoft. We classified WUI across the conterminous United States at 30‐m resolution using a circular neighborhood mapping algorithm with a variable radius to determine thresholds of housing density and vegetation cover. We used our maps to (1) determine the total area of the WUI and number of buildings included, (2) assess the sensitivity of WUI area included and spatial pattern of WUI maps to choice of neighborhood size, (3) assess regional differences between building‐based WUI maps and census‐based WUI maps, and (4) determine how building location accuracy affected WUI map accuracy. Our building‐based WUI maps identified 5.6%–18.8% of the conterminous United States as being in the WUI, with larger neighborhoods increasing WUI area but excluding isolated building clusters. Building‐based maps identified more WUI area relative to census‐based maps for all but the smallest neighborhoods, particularly in the north‐central states, and large differences were attributable to high numbers of non‐housing structures in rural areas. Overall WUI classification accuracy was 98.0%. For wildfire risk mapping and for general purposes, WUI maps based on the 500‐m neighborhood represent the original Federal Register definition of the WUI; these maps include clusters of buildings in and adjacent to wildlands and exclude remote, isolated buildings. Our approach for mapping the WUI offers flexibility and high spatial detail and can be widely applied to take advantage of the growing availability of high‐resolution building footprint data sets and classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year, the four federal agencies that manage designated wilderness in the United States receive proposals to implement small‐ and large‐scale ecological restorations within the National Wilderness Preservation System. The combination of climate change with other landscape stressors is driving ecological restoration to be one of the single most important, challenging, and potentially litigious wilderness stewardship issues. In addition, different stakeholders may have strongly divergent views about what the right decision should be, and decisions need to go beyond routine technical and scientific analyses to incorporate a broader range of legal and ethical considerations. We present a framework based on a comprehensive, structured set of scientific, legal, and ethical questions to guide the evaluation of proposals for ecological restoration and other types of ecological intervention in wilderness. This framework of questions is a voluntary tool designed to increase communication and transparency among scientists, managers, and interested publics regarding the trade‐offs and uncertainties of ecological restoration, and promote informed public deliberation in managing the public resource of wilderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New dates from culturally modified red pine rediscovered in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota provide an opportunity to merge tree-ring records of human land use with archaeological records, historical travel accounts, and traditional knowledge to enhance understanding of Anishinaabeg land tenure in the Wilderness. Records from 244 culturally modified trees (CMTs) demonstrate varying intensities of human use along historical water routes, notably the Border Route that connected Grand Portage to Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods during the North American fur trade. Crossdated modification years from 119 CMTs provide direct evidence of human-landscape interaction along historical travel routes utilized by Anishinaabeg and Euro-American traders from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s. This CMT network preserves a fading biological record of fur-trade-era cultural history that contributes to a growing cross-cultural conversation on the storied traditional use of a cultural landscape that is now the most visited federal wilderness area in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of writer James Fenimore Cooper in quest for American identity. Topics discussed include setting a precursor for America's national parks; wilderness as an icon for America, but in doing so he also grapples with the difficulties of trying to define "wilderness; and expresses real concerns for the destruction that occurs when wilderness comes into contact with civilization.

The article discusses the late U.S. Senator Frank Church from Idaho in relation to the 50th anniversary of the passage of America's 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and it mentions then-Senator Church's legislative leadership and his contributions to wilderness protection and land conservation efforts in Idaho. Church's support for environmental protection is assessed, along with incidents involving the Oxbow Dam and dam construction on the Snake River.

The National Park Service represents the nation's largest initiative in landscape conservation and preservation. As both a material and cultural construct, national parks are living memorials to a uniquely American wilderness narrative. In celebration of the National Park Service Centennial, American Wild is a speculative proposal for digital landscape preservation. The project generates civic pride by connecting the distinctive architecture of the Washington, DC Metro to the national parks. Using ultra-high-definition recordings, videos of each park are individually projection-mapped at full scale. The memorial creates a timeline of the National Park Service's 100-year history that advocates for its next centennial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study aimed to identify the variation in wilderness values across the population. Topics discussed include provisions of the U.S. Wilderness Act; value of wilderness lands in a framework that encompasses ecological, inspirational, and experiential values; and ways in which wilderness values are social facts, and thus may shift and be reproduced with societal trends.

The article discusses radical romanticism in literature with wilderness of the Grand Canyon. Topics discussed includes cultivation of the wild to establish a democratic and environmental culture in both its literal and metaphorical forms; and work of radical Romantics like William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau and Terry Tempest Williams.

Outdoor educators are adapting practices to respond to the priorities of education for sustainability. New practices are emerging or adopted from elsewhere. In Europe, the American recreational movement of Leave No Trace (LNT) has influenced environmental education programs. LNT has been criticized for encouraging a reduction in environmental impact in wilderness areas while ignoring the more significant impacts of equipment purchase, travel, and modern lifestyles. This paper extends the critiques of LNT, suggesting that it encourages attitudes of a separation from nature. It suggests that the LNT concept is unrealistic and unhelpful in Europe, where most landscapes have experienced the impact of humans for millennia. Inspired by European approaches of human-nature relations, and at a time of need for significant environmental changes, I suggest that educational programs seeking to connect people with nature encourage people to "leave more trace" or, perhaps, to "consider their trace" instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wilderness Act of 1964 protects certain federal lands in the United States, called "wilderness areas," from human habitation and development. When the Wilderness Act was first passed, nonmotorized bicycle travel was allowed in wilderness areas. However, in 1984, the United States Forest Service altered its interpretation of the statutory text of the Wilderness Act and banned nonmotorized bicycle travel in wilderness areas. Seeking to reverse the Forest Service's blanket-ban on bicycles in wilderness areas, bicycle activists sought a legislative remedy. In March of 2017, House Federal Lands Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock introduced House Bill 1349 to the United States House of Representatives. H.R. 1349 proposes to amend the Wilderness Act by allowing the use of nonmotorized bicycles, among other forms of nonmotorized transport, in wilderness areas. On December 13, 2017, the House Committee on Natural Resources passed H.R. 1349 and reported the bill to the House floor for consideration. This Note argues that federal agencies have misinterpreted the text of the Wilderness Act and urges members of Congress to vote in favor of H.R. 1349. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses and wildland vegetation meet or intermingle, and where wildfire problems are most pronounced. Here we report that the WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million; 41% growth) and land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 km² 33% growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States. The vast majority of new WUI areas were the result of new housing (97%), not related to an increase in wildland vegetation. Within the perimeter of recent wildfires (1990-2015), there were 286,000 houses in 2010, compared with 177,000 in 1990. Furthermore, WUI growth often results in more wildfire ignitions, putting more lives and houses at risk. Wildfire problems will not abate if recent housing growth trends continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the turn of the century, myriad books and articles – from academics, journalists, organizational leaders and grassroots activists – explored the state of American environmentalism, outlining ideological antagonisms and tracing the contours of possible twenty-first century trajectories. In recent years, however, there have been few such analyses, and those that do exist continue to rely on the ideal types of the past. This article explores the shifting ideological contours of American environmentalism by (1) detailing how extant works categorize American environmental ideologies, and (2) employing discourse and content analysis of sixteen American environmental organizations to consider whether existing ideal-types capture the ideological variability driving contemporary environmental practice. It concludes by outlining six twenty-first century American environmental ideal-types: wilderness preservationism; liberal environmentalism; traditional environmental justice; techno-ecological optimism; socio-ecological progressivism; and socio-ecological radicalism. The article argues that the latter three ideological variants signal an ontological shift that cuts to the core of environmental practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ‘wildland–urban interface’ (WUI) is a term commonly used to describe areas where wildfires and the built environment have the potential to interact resulting in loss of properties and potential loss of life. Significant residential losses associated with wildland interface fires have occurred worldwide in recent years and substantial research has been conducted on developing numerical models of ignition due to convection and ember attacks. These studies provide substantial insight into the behaviour and growth of wildland fires, which have been further utilized to build fire exposure rating of structures. The FireWise program in the United States and the FireSmart manual in Canada are two key examples of provisions developed for determining fire exposure ratings for a structure. While previous studies provide significant contribution to modelling fire propagation, a much more comprehensive model is required, which would encompass all the key variables associated with WUI fires. This paper aims at extending previously conducted efforts by developing a simulation-based model. A typical fire propagation simulation requires solving the coupled fluid-thermal differential equations which results in extreme run times making it unsuitable for general purposes, however the model in this study utilizes theory of cellular automata, which reduces the processing times substantially by simplifying the underlying equations involved. Cellular automata utilize a specific set of rules to model propagation by convection as well as ember travel. In addition, the model also considers key parameters such as humidity, nature of vegetation and topology while evaluating the propagation paths. Due to the flexible nature of the model its accuracy can be tuned to a certain extent by optimizing the propagation rules using real-event data [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Alpine ski recreation is one of the most popular outdoor winter sports globally but often involves habitat modification and dense human activity, both of which can harm wildlife. We investigated the effects of ski area development and winter recreation activities on movement, occupancy, and density of Pacific martens ( Martes caurina) in the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada, USA by comparing 3 ski and 3 control study areas. We systematically surveyed martens using live traps and hair snares during spring-summer and winter seasons from 2009 through 2011 to identify how martens responded to the year-round effects of habitat fragmentation from ski area development and the seasonal effects of winter recreation activities. Martens selectively moved between remnant forest patches with the shortest crossing distances across open, non-forested ski runs in both seasons, with the effect more pronounced in females. Overall, habitat connectivity was reduced by 41% in ski areas compared to habitat not fragmented by ski runs. During spring-summer, occupancy rates were not different between habitat within or outside of ski operations areas. During winter, however, occupancy was significantly lower inside (52%) ski area boundaries than outside (88%) them. Reduced detection probability in ski areas indicated martens also reduced the frequency of use of operations areas in winter. Using spatially explicit capture-recapture models, we found that marten density did not differ between ski areas and controls during spring, but during winter female density declined at ski areas by 63% compared to spring-summer and was <50% of female density compared to controls. This suggests that females seasonally avoid habitat in ski areas by shifting their habitat use to areas outside ski operations boundaries during winter. Although male marten density did not differ, the lack of resident males >3 years old coupled with higher annual turnover rates suggests male densities at ski areas may be reliant on annual male immigration. In winter, martens avoided using habitat in ski operations areas when recreation activity was greatest. Winter ski recreation may not be incompatible with marten use of habitat in ski areas, but habitat fragmentation from ski areas affects marten movement and recreation activities affect seasonal habitat occupancy and female density. Maintaining functional habitat connectivity, via networks of short ski run crossings that link habitat in and out of ski areas, will be important for maintaining or improving marten use of remnant habitat in developed ski areas. © 2017 The Wildlife Society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the public dialogues used in the wilderness designation effort on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington state, USA, to either support or negate the designation. Conflict in the concept of wilderness sprouts from incompatible philosophies of broader human-nature relationships. The concept of “wilderness” in the USA, as embedded in the 1964 Wilderness Act, reflects how the pro-designation community interprets humankind’s relationship to nature and the physical landscapes protected under the Wilderness Act are managed to reflect that community's’ understanding of nature. Conflicts arise when other communities perceive their own understandings of nature to be threatened by the concept of wilderness and the constraints it places on activities in the protected area. Using this case study of Wilderness Area designation on the Olympic Peninsula, this paper demonstrates how different sides of a conflict over wilderness legislation use cultural narratives to dominate the public dialogues surrounding wilderness. Actors in the debate seek to create a story of powerlessness and use this as a tool to legitimize their claim that nature and heritage are at risk. The case study is placed within the broader literature on political ecology and the complex role wilderness plays in American identity and heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sole direction in the Wilderness Act of 1964 concerning commercial livestock grazing in wilderness is forty words long: "Within wilderness areas in the national forests designated by this Art, the grazing of livestock. where established prior to September 3, 1964, shall be permitted to continue subject to such reasonable regulations as are deemed necessary by the Secretary of Agriculture." We discuss just what these words mean in the context of the law and the subsequent so-called Congressional Grazing Guidelines, and examine recent agency misinterpretations of this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wilderness attracts tourists and generates visitor spending in proximate communities as people enjoy Wilderness for outdoor recreation. Wilderness also attracts amenity migrants and out-of-region investments into surrounding regional economies. To investigate the amount and types of employment and income generated by Wilderness visitation, we conducted an economic contribution analysis of aggregate national visitor expenditures. The U.S. Forest Service National Visitor Use and Monitoring (NVUM) economic spending profiles were used to construct types and amounts of Wilderness visitor spending and were applied to an estimated 9.9 million annual visitors across federal agencies. IMPLAN modeling software was used to estimate total effects and multipliers for output, employment, income, and value added. Results show that some $500 million is annually spent in communities adjacent to Wilderness, generating a direct effect of 5,700 jobs and a total output effect over $700 million across numerous industries ($2012 including indirect and induced effects). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerald ash borer, Agrilus planipennis (Coleoptera: Buprestidae), is rapidly invading North America and has inflicted extensive ash, Fraxinus spp., mortality in affected areas, altering composition and structure of wildland and urban forests. Insecticides can effectively protect ash on a small scale and classical biological control efforts have been implemented. In the U.S. emerald ash borer kills native ash so quickly, and populations are so mobile, that establishing an effective biological control program is challenging. Consequently, we assessed the compatibility of using reduced rates of the insecticide imidacloprid applied as a soil drench coupled with releases of three species of parasitic wasps. In this way we hope to slow the process of ash decline and prolong the window of opportunity to allow biological control agents to become established. We compared the efficacy and effects of i) full strength imidacloprid applications, ii) reduced rates of imidacloprid coupled with classical biological control, iii) classical biological control alone, and iv) untreated controls. We monitored emerald ash borer adult activity through trapping and destructive sampling for larvae, evaluated larval parasitization rates, and also assessed the native hymenopteran communities. Chemical treatments were not adequate to prevent ash canopy decline, but they also did not impede parasitization of emerald ash borer eggs or larvae. Two of the three classical biological control agents, Oobius agrili and Tetrastichus planipennisi , were recovered from trees treated with imidacloprid, demonstrating that they were successfully reproducing and indicating the compatibility of the two management strategies. Non-target hymenopterans appeared unaffected by the insecticide applications. Importantly we found no negative effects of the imidacloprid applications on native pollinators. Collectively these data suggest that judicious use of insecticides coupled with classical biological control may be an effective and potentially sustainable approach to managing invading populations of emerald ash borer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental regulations often have the objective of eliminating the lower tail of an index of environmental quality. That part of the distribution of environmental quality moves somewhere above a threshold and where in the original distribution it moves is a function of the control strategy chosen. This paper provides an approach for estimating the economic benefits of different distributional changes as the worst environmental conditions are removed. The proposed approach is illustrated by examining shifts in visibility at Class I visibility areas (National Parks and wilderness areas) that would occur with implementation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Regional Haze Program. In this application we show that people value shifts in the distribution of visibility and place a higher value on the removal of a low visibility day than on the addition of a high visibility day. We found that respondents would pay about $120 per year in the Southeast U.S. and about $80 per year in the Southwest U.S. for improvement programs that remove the 20% worst visibility days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the image of French Canadian immigrants involved in the logging industry in the Northeastern United States and the evolution of the racial discourse on whiteness, wilderness, and work in North America. It discusses the American wilderness as an exclusive place for white middle-class men, the depiction of French Canadians in literature including in the book "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau, French Canadian Catholics, and French Canadians' relations with First Nations.

The growing concerns about civil society's connections with wilderness raise intriguing questions about the dynamic character of wilderness meanings and engagement. In this review, we use the notion of an adaptive cycle to suggest that our societal relationships with wilderness are dynamic and not static and that by understanding the adaptive character of connectedness and social cohesiveness, stewardship organizations will have a greater capacity to adapt and respond rather than feel threatened. For each of four stages in the adaptive cycle, we propose information and organizational needs, including leadership that is sensitive to the changing character of relevancy and that can steer an agency through change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the climate and in key ecological processes are prompting increased debate about ecological restoration and other interventions in wilderness. The prospect of intervention in wilderness raises legal, scientific, and values-based questions about the appropriateness of possible actions. In this article, we focus on the role of science to elucidate the potential need for intervention. We review the meaning of "untrammeled" from the 1964 Wilderness Act to aid our understanding of the legal context for potential interventions in wilderness. We explore the tension between restraint and active intervention in managing wilderness and introduce a framework for testing ecological assumptions when evaluating restoration proposals. We illustrate use of the framework in the restoration of fire regimes and fuel conditions in ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests of the US Rocky Mountains. Even in this relatively well-studied example, we find that the assumptions underlying proposed interventions in wilderness need to be critically evaluated and tested before new, more intensive management paradigms are embraced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science should inform wilderness stewardship as we learn more about ecological systems, individual species and their habitats, human behavior, and the successes and failures of various policies and management activities. Science can help us understand the nature of the system for which we are a steward. It can help in learning how to correct human-caused perturbations in such systems. It can help in understanding how systems might be used and enjoyed without destroying them. It can help in understanding how valuable wilderness is to people and how it might enhance their lives. (Pinchot Institute for Conservation 2001, p. 14). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss their observations regarding the management of wilderness stewardship in the U.S. They identified wilderness stewardship challenges, such as identification of federal lands qualified for designation as areas in the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), and emphasized potential ways to address them, such as having a consistent policy for management of NWPS. They also mentioned the need to change the way agencies undertake wilderness management.

For many people today, the idea of wilderness conjures up meanings and images referring to wild, remote, and untrammeled natural areas, which need protection from human presence and utilization. Institutionally, the first Wilderness Act was prescribed in the United States over 50 years ago and the wilderness conservation originates from the establishment of the first national parks in North America in the nineteenth century. First conservation and wilderness areas and related legal acts provided a model on how to organize and manage conservation areas globally. However, this created ‘fortress’ model of global conservation thinking, separating wilderness, and nature from culture and people, has recently been increasingly challenged by views calling for more people-centered approaches in natural resource management. In addition, the tourism industry has become an increasingly important user and socioeconomic element of change in wilderness areas, which has created new kinds of utilization needs for the remaining wild environments. Thus, there are different ways to understand what wilderness is and for and from whom we are protecting those areas. This paper aims to overview some of the key perspectives on how wilderness environment are contextualized, used, and contested: as units of strict conservation; resources for livelihoods and raw materials, and/or tourist products. The purpose is to point out that while we have different and often conflicting understandings of what wilderness is and what it is for, there are also potentially symbiotic relations between different views which could help us to protect the remaining wilderness areas. This is the case especially in the Global South, where the sociopolitical pressures of economic utilization of the remaining wilderness environments are currently the sharpest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, an evolution has occurred in the instruction of wilderness professionals and practitioners within the higher education realm. The National Wilderness Conference, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, provided a timely opportunity to discuss the current and future role of higher education and wilderness among academics and wilderness practitioners. During this conference, directives were released through a vision document, providing a set of shared interagency goals, priorities, and actions to guide future collaborative stewardship of designated wilderness. In this commentary stemming from this conference and aligning with the vision directives, we discuss the role of higher education and wilderness-based curriculum in the historical development of instruction, current academic practices through examples, challenges that should be considered, and suggestions for moving forward to enhance wilderness preservation and professionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wilderness debate that has raged in American environmentalism since the 1990s has led to the valuation of less spectacular forms of nature than wilderness. This increasing interest in ordinary nature brings American environmental thought to an environmental ground more familiar to French ecologists. Although the wilderness idea that has focused on untrammeled places was difficult to integrate into the French philosophical landscape, reaching common ground could foster exchanges between American environmental ethics and French political ecology. More precisely, the renewal of naturalism that emerged from the wilderness debate could inform French political ecology, which sometimes tends to reduce environmental problems to social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a wealth of US wildfire activity data available for such analyses, but users must be aware of inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty in the data in order to maximise the integrity and utility of their work. Data for analysis are generally acquired from archival summary reports of the federal or interagency fire organisations; incident-level wildfire reporting systems of the federal, state and local fire services; and, increasingly, remote-sensing programs. This paper provides an overview of each of these sources and the major reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty within them. Use of national fire reporting systems by state and local fire organisations has been rising in recent decades, providing an improved set of incident-level (documentary) data for all-lands analyses of wildfire activity. A recent effort to compile geospatial documentary fire records for the USA for 1992-2013 has been completed. The resulting dataset has been evaluated for completeness using archival summary reports and includes a linkage to a widely used, remotely sensed wildfire perimeter dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indices are typically associated with the number and final size of newly discovered fires, or averaged over time and associated with the likelihood and total burned area of large fires. Herein we used a decade (2003-12) of NFDRS indices and US Forest Service (USFS) fire reports to examine daily relationships between fire danger and the number and growth rate of wildfires burning within a single predictive service area (PSA) in the Northern Rockies, USA. Results demonstrate that daily associations can be used to: (1) extend the utility of the NFDRS beyond the discovery date of new fires; (2) examine and justify the temporal window within which daily fire danger indices are averaged and related to total burned area; (3) quantify the probability of managing an active incident as a function of fire danger; and (4) quantify the magnitude and variability of daily fire growth as a function of fire danger. The methods herein can be extended to other areas with a daily history of weather and fire records, and can be used to better inform fire management decisions or to compare regional responses of daily fire activity to changes in fire danger. Associating daily National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indices with daily metrics of ongoing fire activity reveals that as fire danger increases there is a corresponding but seasonally dependent increase in both the average and variability in the daily number and daily growth of active incidents burning in the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a wilderness area on the US-Mexico border in Arizona, conflicting policies permit the provision of supplementary water for wildlife but not for undocumented immigrants passing through the area. Federal refuge environmental policy prioritizes active management of endangered and threatened species. Vast systems of water resources have been developed to support wildlife conservation in this extremely hot and dry environment. At the same time, humanitarian groups are not allowed to supply water to undocumented border-crossers in the park. Human border-crossers must utilize nonpotable wildlife water “guzzlers” for survival and face a real risk of illness or death by dehydration. This article analyzes human rights via an ethnographic lens. From this perspective, water policy at the wildlife refuge brings into question the value of human life in a border conservation context, especially for those entering the site “illegally.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that Aldo Leopold's pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing corollary--a disdain for human population growth that culminated in a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and he submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these views with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous proposed social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of what environmental historian William Cronon called the ''Trouble with Wilderness. '' This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas, such as wilderness, form the foundation of most strategies to conserve biological diversity. However, the success of protected areas in achieving conservation goals depends partly on how well ecological diversity is represented in a network of designated lands. We examined how well the world’s largest highly-protected conservation network—the U.S. National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS)—currently represents ecological systems found on federal lands in the contiguous United States and how ecological system representation has accumulated over the 50-year tenure of the Wilderness Act (passed in 1964 and giving the U.S. Congress authority to establish wilderness areas). Although the total area of NWPS has risen fairly steadily since 1964, the diversity of ecological systems accumulated in wilderness areas (436 ecological systems) reached an asymptote 30 years ago that is well below the total pool of ecological systems available (553) on federal lands. Thus, NWPS currently under-represents ecological system diversity. Additionally, only 113 ecological systems are represented at more than 20% of federal land area. As the designation of new wilderness areas becomes more difficult, it is important to increase the ecological representation of those areas to achieve greater protection of biological diversity. Over the next 50 years of the Wilderness Act, federal land-management agencies and the U.S. Congress could increase the ecological diversity of wilderness areas by prioritizing under-represented ecological systems in new wilderness legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses J. Horace McFarland, the former president of the American Civic Association (ACA), and it mentions McFarland's rhetorical skills and his work in promoting outdoor activities and the wilderness in America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The history of environmental reform in the U.S. is mentioned, along with McFarland's experience in the woods. An environmental movement in the country is examined, as well as McFarland's expertise and his role as a lobbyist.