Postdoctoral Fellow University of Oklahoma, United States
Prescribed fire provides a valuable option for land managers to conduct cost-effective habitat management, invasive species control, and restoration. Prescribed fire networks in Oklahoma and North Carolina are compared using government and non-profit organizational actors as the primary unit of analysis. By focusing on the organizations involved with supporting and or carrying out prescribed burns, this project takes a preliminary step toward a better understanding for how networks of fire practitioners are arranged and how the placement of individual actors may influence social capital. Measures of individual and network social capital are used to compare and contrast these regionally representative state networks on the basis of actor importance and collaboration with other actor types as well as network centralization and density. The results indicate that the two networks are similar in structure, but that there are some interesting differences which include the composition of core and peripheral actor groups as well as prominence of certain actor types. The data reported here may be helpful for networks which seek to improve performance of prescribed fire operations and better integrate long-term ecological strategies with short-term goals and labor capabilities.
