Published In
Fire Ecology
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-13-2026
Subjects
Wildfire adaptation; Communication; Natural language processing; Climate change
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.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
DOI
10.1186/s42408-026-00576-3
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45335
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation Details
Sachdeva, S., Johnson, M. L., Sachs, J., & Hixson, K. (2026). Understanding the wildfire adaptation communications landscape in the western United States: examining actors, media type, and geographies. Fire Ecology, 22(1).