Prescribed fire dominates public conversation about wildfire adaptation in the western United States, but building codes, ordinances, and business continuity planning are nearly invisible in that discourse, according to a new analysis published in the journal Fire Ecology. Their goal was to map, at a scale not previously attempted, who communicates about wildfire adaptation, which adaptation concepts receive the most visibility, and how those patterns vary across platforms, organizational types, and geographies.
After removing duplicates and empty entries, the samples included 215 press releases, 1,462 news articles, 4,104 Facebook posts, 14,067 Reddit items, 19,090 Twitter/X posts, and 13,596 Instagram items.
The headline result concerns what the conversation is about. Operational updates and schedules for prescribed burns accounted for 29.8 percent of all paragraph chunks, or 72 topics, often accompanied by discussion of weather windows (4.0 percent) and operational risks and safeguards (5.5 percent). Indigenous cultural burning was the second most prominent theme at 19.3 percent. Community Wildfire Protection Plans and related participation made up 9.9 percent, with outreach and stewardship activities at 2.2 percent and knowledge exchange through newsletters, webinars, and agency briefings at 4.5 percent. Defensible space, home hardening, and insurance considerations represented 3.8 percent, references to specific landscapes 7.9 percent, broader fire risk framing including climate change and modeling 6.8 percent, and mechanical fuel treatments such as thinning 6.2 percent.
How these themes were distributed depended strongly on the channel. Twitter/X contributed the largest share of paragraph chunks at 50.78 percent and heavily overrepresented active and planned prescribed fire updates, with a Pearson standardized residual of +28.68, along with community wildfire protection planning (+14.15), while underrepresenting cultural burning, mechanical treatments, and prescribed fire weather discussion. Reddit showed a striking overrepresentation of cultural burning (+35.08) and Facebook also overindexed on that theme (+12.34) and on knowledge exchange. Instagram concentrated on outreach and stewardship (+15.50), knowledge exchange, mechanical fuel treatments, and defensible space. Mass media showed pronounced positive residuals for prescribed fire and weather (+34.19), mechanical fuel treatments (+23.40), risks of prescribed fire (+20.22), and fire risk including climate change, while underrepresenting day-to-day operational updates. The Forest Service’s own press releases were, unsurprisingly, the dominant channel for the WCS landscape theme (+46.65) but underrepresented operational burn updates and community planning content.
The analysis of organizational types revealed that individual users dominated the social media conversation, contributing 65.64 percent of paragraph chunks. Among institutional voices, the USFS was the most prominent at 7.81 percent, followed by media outlets (6.73 percent), state government agencies (5.01 percent), non-profit organizations (4.65 percent), and a long tail of coalitions, county and municipal governments, other federal agencies, universities, businesses, and city governments. Each type carried a distinct thematic signature: county governments overrepresented community wildfire protection planning (+7.69), municipal governments overrepresented cultural burning (+14.50) and outreach, non-profits overrepresented active and planned fire updates (+7.17), coalitions and task forces overrepresented fire risk and climate modeling (+13.38), and universities overrepresented cultural burning (+7.74). The authors interpret this specialization as evidence that adaptation communication operates through a distributed network of voices rather than any single institutional source.
Geographic patterns could be analyzed only for Twitter/X, the sole platform with usable location metadata, and the authors are careful to frame these findings as platform-specific observations rather than a full account of regional variation. Within that subset, Colorado was overrepresented in community wildfire protection planning (+6.86), while Montana, Arizona, and New Mexico were underrepresented in that theme. New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon showed clear overrepresentation of risks of prescribed fire. Montana (+7.16) and Washington (+5.09) overrepresented cultural burning, whereas California and Arizona underrepresented it, a pattern the authors suggest may reflect the complex dynamics of tribal-state relationships and institutional barriers in California despite the state’s extensive Indigenous fire history. Oregon dominated fire risk and climate modeling discourse (+18.65), Arizona led real-time operational updates (+7.13), and California skewed toward knowledge exchange (+5.71).
Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns what is missing. Referring back to the Fire Adapted Communities framework, which codifies practices ranging from defensible space to land-use planning, the researchers found that infrastructure and business continuity, codes, and ordinances received minimal attention across all platforms and organizational types. Building codes, zoning regulations, and land-use planning are established tools for reducing wildfire risk, yet they generated comparatively little public-facing digital discourse in this corpus. The authors note they did not analyze where such topics are discussed instead, so they record the absence as a finding and leave its explanation to future work, while raising the possibility that the sheer volume of prescribed fire communication could crowd out visibility for smaller but important conversations about regulatory strategies.
The study comes with candid limitations. The collection window was short and fixed, and it coincided with a period of substantial change at Twitter/X, including a change in ownership and content moderation policies that may have altered which content appeared. Twitter/X users skew younger and more technology-engaged than the general population, so state-level patterns describe platform discourse rather than the states themselves. The analysis focused on English-language content, potentially missing communications from Indigenous and other communities, and the manual screening steps lacked a formal intercoder-reliability statistic. Most fundamentally, the authors emphasize that measuring how often a topic occurs in public text is not the same as measuring its importance or influence on audiences; frequency of coverage was not interpreted as evidence of audience belief, behavior change, or communication effectiveness.
Even with those caveats, the study offers a baseline portrait of a decentralized, multi-actor communication ecosystem in which adaptation messaging extends well beyond the Forest Service to state agencies, local governments, non-profits, and community coalitions, each emphasizing different facets of living with fire. The authors argue that such mapping is a practical input for the living-with-fire paradigm: identifying where key adaptation elements remain absent from public-facing discourse, such as codes, ordinances, and continuity planning, highlights gaps that future communication efforts, and future research pairing content analysis with audience-side measures like surveys and experiments, could begin to address.
Subject of Research: Communication of wildfire adaptation concepts across press releases, news media, and social media in the western United States
Article Title: Understanding the wildfire adaptation communications landscape in the western United States: examining actors, media type, and geographies
Article References: 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), Article 156. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-026-00576-3
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s42408-026-00576-3
Keywords: wildfire adaptation, prescribed fire, Fire Adapted Communities, topic modeling, social media analysis, Wildfire Crisis Strategy, cultural burning, communication research, western United States, defensible space, community wildfire protection plans, geographic variation
News Source: Gavin Prescott. (October 29, 2026). Who talks about wildfire adaptation? New study maps the western US conversation. Scienmag.
