Adapting to Southwest Idaho's Shifting Wildfire Regime: Sustainable Collaboration as a Means to Socioecological Resilience

Community wildfire adaptation is happening at multiple scales across the western United States. A range of collaboratively formed groups have addressed compounding issues related to wildfire risk, forest health and land use. In Southwestern Idaho, place-based collaboratives emerging in the early 2000s have considered trade-offs between localized social and ecological needs as they approach wildfire adaptation from the bottom-up. More recently, regional partnerships have emerged that emphasize cross-boundary wildfire risk reduction to cover larger geographic areas for risk mitigation. In between these micro- and macro-scales of activity exist bridging agencies such as county and state-level programs that account for gaps in coordination across spatial and temporal scales, and between local and federal objectives. This study seeks to understand and characterize the challenge of scaling up wildfire adaptation efforts from a place-specific to a region-wide scale. By conducting a case study within Southwestern Idaho, I found that each type of collaborative group exhibits complementary strengths that suggest positive scale-dependence from local to landscape-scale wildfire adaptation. I also found that localized collaborations place an emphasis on trade-offs between forest resilience and wildfire risk reduction, whereas federally led initiatives focus mainly on wildfire risk reduction.