Fire affects society in a multitude of ways, including loss of life, property, and health; costs of fire suppression; goods and services used by society; and the capacity of people to maintain their current lifestyles and cultural traditions. Some of these effects can be directly quantified; others are strongly modified by a cultural filter of human perceptions. Ultimately, it is the human perceptions of fire effects that link the consequences of fire back to human impacts on fire regime. We hypothesize that both the effects of fire and the perceptions of these effects differ among fire managers, people living along roads (dominated by western influences), and people living remote from roads (largely Native people). We will quantify the effects of fire and assess the influence of these fire effects on the perceptions of three groups of people using data from agency records, interviews, and surveys.

This will be followed by a more comprehensive (and less intensive) survey of the arctic-boreal region, especially the forest-tundra transition, to explore the regional variation in human-fire interactions. These surveys will enable us to explore sources of variation in human-fire interaction other than the national and cultural factors that we initially hypothesize to be important.