Although it makes sense that organizations would invest in
relationships with organizations that share similar goals and geographic
foci, this social structure is problematic for managing large
landscapes to achieve broad, shared goals at the ecoregional scale.
In fire-prone landscapes such as the ECE, some forest restoration
activities (e.g., thinning to restore desired structure) can
help reduce the risk of large wildfire, and some fire protection activities (e.g., thinning to reduce flammable vegetation) can help
return forest structure and processes to their natural fire regimes.
Despite the complementarity of forest restoration and fire protection,
these two types of organizations did not appear to engage in a
pattern of interaction that reflects frequent communication, coordination
or joint problem-solving. The lack of apparent high-levels
of cooperation among these organizations could hinder recognition
of interdependencies between fire protection and forest
restoration. It could also limit opportunities to develop mutually
acceptable strategies for addressing the problem of large and
intense wildfires burning across the jurisdictions of the multiple
ownerships and stakeholder groups that comprise the ecoregion.
Moreover, despite wildfire’s tendency to burn across administrative
and ownership boundaries, fire protection organizations
did not appear to be very interconnected at the scale of the ECE:
they were named as working partners and information sources
by less than two other fire protection organizations on average,
whereas forest restoration organizations were named by more than
three other forest restoration organizations on average (Table 1).
Although we did not ask who they worked with and sought
information from during fire events (which might have reflected
stronger ties) the low average indegree of fire protection organizations
may be a reflection of legal and policy barriers that
prevent planning and implementing joint wildfire risk mitigation
actions across their different jurisdictions (Fischer & Charnley,
2012; Knight & Landres, 1998; Landres et al., 1998).
Our finding of relatively little bridging social capital at local
levels may reflectthe logic of cooperation on natural resource management
at smaller spatial scales than the ecoregion. Although the
accumulation of flammable forest vegetation is an ecoregion-wide
problem, wildfire events rarely if ever occur on the scale of an entire
ecoregion. Thus, while collective ecoregion-wide problem solving
and coordination of plans and actions would likely be fruitful, cooperation
to conduct the work of thinning and prescribed burning to
minimize potential movement of fire across the landscape makes
more sense on smaller scales. The mismatch between the spatial
scales on which landscapes and humans function, as suggested by our findings, arguably has led to a disconnect between the spatial
scale of an ecological problem and the spatial scale of human
response (Kondolf & Podolak, 2014). Despite increasing wildfire risk
being an ecoregion-scale problem, we see little evidence of social
organization for addressing the problem at this scale