Testimony of Roger B. Hammer, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Sustainable Rural Communities Initiative,
Oregon State University before the House Interior, Environment & Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee,
Oversight Hearing on Wildfire Management, February 12, 2008
We estimate the impact of strict and multiple use protected areas on forest disturbance in European Russia between 1985 and 2010. We construct a spatial panel dataset that includes five periods of change. We match protected areas to control observations and compare coefficients from fixed versus random effects models. We...
The number of wildland–urban interface communities affected by wildfire is increasing, and both wildfire suppression and losses are costly. However, little is known about post-wildfire response by homeowners and communities after buildings are lost. Our goal was to characterise rebuilding and new development after wildfires across the conterminous United States....
The wildland urban interface (WUI) delineates the areas where wildland fire hazard most directly impacts human communities and threatens lives and property, and where houses exert the strongest influence on the natural environment. Housing data are a major problem for WUI mapping. When housing data are zonal, the concept of...
Over the past 60 years, housing growth has outpaced population growth
in the United States. Conservationists are concerned about the far-reaching environmental
impacts of housing development, particularly in rural areas. We use
clustering analysis to examine the pattern and distribution of housing development
since 1940 in and around the Northern...
Land-use change around protected areas limits their ability to conserve biodiversity by altering ecological processes such as natural hydrologic and disturbance regimes, facilitating species invasions, and interfering with dispersal of organisms. This paper informs USA National Wildlife Refuge System conservation planning by predicting future land-use change on lands within 25...
National-scale analyses of fire occurrence are needed to prioritize fire policy and
management activities across the United States. However, the drivers of national-scale
patterns of fire occurrence are not well understood, and how the relative importance of human
or biophysical factors varies across the country is unclear. Our research goal...
Maps of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) are both pragmatic policy tools and powerful visual images with broad appeal. While the growing number of WUI maps serve the same general purpose, this paper demonstrates that WUI maps based on the same data can differ in ways related to their purpose, and...
Providing food, timber, energy, housing, and other goods and services, while maintaining ecosystem functions and biodiversity that underpin their sustainable supply, is one of the great challenges of our time. Understanding the drivers of land-use change and how policies can alter land-use change will be critical to meeting this challenge....
As people encroach increasingly on natural areas, one question is how this affects avian biodiversity.
The answer to this is partly scale-dependent. At broad scales, human populations and biodiversity
concentrate in the same areas and are positively associated, but at local scales people and biodiversity are
negatively associated with biodiversity....
