Connecting Wildfire Recovery and Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: Post-fire Insights from the Southwestern United States.

Relationships between social and ecological recovery, and their influence on resilience during future wildfires, are often undocumented in post-fire research. The settings within which these processes occur and the factors that affect their progression can vary widely based on local contexts. We sought to document understandings of recovery, resilience, and the relationship between these two processes across six Southwestern US wildfires that burned in different social-ecological systems. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 62 key informants involved in various aspects of recovery after each fire to explore recovery and resilience as interacting processes within social-ecological systems while also documenting varied understandings and uncertainties that influence local progress. Interviews revealed varied understandings of what recovery and resilience entailed among individuals engaged in post-fire processes that produced both opportunities and drawbacks to collective progress after wildfire. While key informants recognized a broader need to intertwine social and ecological recovery efforts to advance resilience, there was little clarity on how to successfully achieve this integration, highlighting how differences in spatial and temporal recovery progress limit coordination. Uncertainty about post-fire outcomes also affected local decision-making about both recovery and resilience. Together, these findings reinforce the applicability of common tenets of social-ecological systems theory such as monitoring feedback, cross-scale interactions, and the co-evolution of social and ecological processes when exploring post-fire recovery. Our findings underscore a need for transparent, inclusive conversations about progress towards recovery and resilience and echo renewed calls for inter-agency and inter-system collaboration to bolster resilience during future fires.