Understanding the wildfire adaptation communications landscape in the western United States: examining actors, media type, and geographies

Abstract Adaptations to living with fire are multifold, and U.S. wildfire policy has increasingly shifted toward proactive management. The U.S. Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) provides coordination and funding for landscape-scale adaptation, yet little is known about how wildfire adaptation is communicated in public online discourse. We analyze press releases, news media, and social media texts from September 2022 to February 2024 to characterize the salience and framing of wildfire adaptation concepts, identify which organizational types are most associated with major themes, and examine geographic variation across ten initial WCS landscapes. Using paragraph-level topic modeling and thematic clustering, we find that wildfire adaptation communication is dominated by prescribed fire, but that most adaptation concepts represented in the Fire Adapted Communities wheel appear across channels. Prescribed fire discourse is internally differentiated (operations, weather windows, and risk/safeguards), and thematic emphasis varies by platform and communicator type. We also observe meaningful state-level variation in adaptation themes within Twitter/X data, consistent with differences in fire history, governance context, and public attention. Together, these findings map a distributed wildfire adaptation communication ecosystem and highlight where key adaptation elements (e.g., codes, ordinances, and continuity planning) remain comparatively absent from public-facing discourse.