Great Basin Fire Science Exchange

Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop
2023-07-09 - 2023-07-12
Workshop website.
About the Workshop: Since 1975, the Natural Hazards Center has hosted the Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in Colorado. Today the Workshop brings together federal, state, and local mitigation and emergency management officials and planning professionals; representatives of nonprofit, private sector, and humanitarian organizations; hazards and disaster researchers; and others dedicated to alleviating the impacts of disasters. You can read more about the Workshop and its history on the Center’s website.

Workshop Information: Information about this year’s theme and opportunities to contribute can be found under the Workshop Info tab above. You can also browse our past Workshops to see previous programs, speakers, and other materials.
Please make sure and subscribe to Workshop updates so you can receive notifications regarding due dates and important announcements.

California Fire Return Interval Departure database: What it is and how to use it
2023-07-19 09:00 - 10:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Webinar recording.
FRID statistics have been used for decades to help managers and scientists understand the ecological consequences of changing fire frequencies. The Forest Service Region 5 Ecology Program worked with UC-Davis to build a spatial FRID data layer that compiles information about fire return intervals for major vegetation types on the 18 National Forests in California and adjacent land jurisdictions. This data layer includes comparisons between pre-Euroamerican settlement (“pre-EAS”) and contemporary fire return intervals (FRIs). The FRID layer may be used for land and resource planning and assessment, as well as other natural resource applications such as fuels treatment planning, postfire restoration project design, management response to fire, assessing the effects of fire and fire regime change on ecosystems, and general ecological understanding of the historic and current occurrence of fire on the California National Forests and neighboring jurisdictions. This presentation focuses on the guts of the FRID data and the departure metrics, describes how to properly use the dataset, discusses some important caveats, outlines current updating and improvement work we are doing with the dataset, and describes a current national effort to develop a similar dataset and metrics for the US.

Increasing post-wildfire planted seedling survival: From experimental plantings to reforestation planning
2023-07-25 11:00 - 12:00
Webinar recording.
This presentation examines how post-fire planting success is influenced by climatic, microclimatic, topographic, and biotic factors. Multiple seedling planting experiments across northern New Mexico were evaluated using seedling monitoring, remote sensing, drone, and microclimate data. The results show tree seedling survival in high severity burn patches is largely determined by microclimatic refugia formed by both topographic variation and existing vegetation. Using machine learning and a new index of seedling survival probability, the most suitable artificial reforestation sites can be mapped for efficient restoration planning. This presentation posits that success rates of reforestation efforts in post-wildfire landscapes could be substantially increased by considering site survivability and suitability.

Fire, flood, and mud: Assessing postfire debris-flow hazards across the western US
2023-07-28 08:30 - 10:00
Webinar registration.
Parts of the western U.S., like southern California and Colorado, have a history of damaging debris flows after wildfire. Other regions are facing new postfire risks due to expanded wildfire activity. After a wildfire, emergency managers need rapid answers to the questions: Where in the burn area are debris flows likely? How much rain will it take to cause a problem? And how big will that problem be?
Using examples of recent postfire events, Jason Kean will describe how the U.S. Geological Survey and its partners work to answer those questions. He will also discuss current research to improve debris-flow hazard assessments with new tools to answer the questions: Where will debris flows will travel? How long it will take the burn area to recover? And what are the risks to future fires?

Native seeds: Supplying restoration- A nine-part video series
2023-08-02 08:00 - 09:00
View videos.
Native Seeds: Supplying Restoration is a nine-part video series that explores the native seed supply chain in the western United States. Filmed over four seasons, this series weaves together footage of seed collectors, farmers, researchers, and land managers working to scale up the supply of native seeds to meet the growing restoration demand. We see the staggering scale of damage to vast landscapes and meet tenacious people who are finding creative, scrappy solutions to restore ecosystems.

Evolution of fire management and the role of knowledge
2023-08-07 08:00 - 09:00
View video.
The story of how fire managers slowed a fire and benefited the ecosystem. This was accomplished thanks to previous fires that were managed for resource benefit. This is the story of the 2021 Rafael Fire that started just 20 miles outside of Flagstaff, AZ. On day 2 the fire ran 12 miles towards town, causing evacuations and worry. Things changed on day 3, watch the video to learn more. This video contains beautiful drone footage of unhealthy forests and the benefits of fire. Thanks to a shift in fire management, a bad situation was transformed into a beneficial one.

Wildfire Crisis Strategy seminar series
2023-08-08 08:00 - 09:00
Access the webinar series.
The Yellowstone fires of 1988 are considered an early fire event signaling the rise of the wildfire crisis we are experiencing today. After building for decades, the crisis erupted in the 2000s as wildfires destroyed lives, homes, and communities on a rising scale. The national response, though initially swift, has not kept pace with the growing impact of catastrophic wildfires. In January 2022, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a 10-year strategy for confronting the wildfire crisis in the United States (Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests).
At the core of the strategy is ramping up fuel and forest health treatments across land ownerships to match the scale of wildfire risk. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and the wildland fire community have laid the foundation for collaboration across landscapes to reduce wildfire risk. Recent influxes in funding, including new funding authorities in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, are helping fuel and forest health projects hit the ground on priority landscapes and high risk “firesheds.”
For decades the Rocky Mountain Research Station has focused on fire science studying topics relevant to wildfire hazard, risk, behavior, and ecology, and providing knowledge support to land managers and a myriad of partners. The expertise and tools developed over decades by RMRS is now central to providing a scientific basis to addressing the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. This series of hour-long seminars took place January 12 – March 23, 2023, to share the individual contributions of RMRS scientists to the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.

Time to restore: Connecting people, plants, and pollinators
2023-08-08 08:00 - 09:00
View webinar recording.
The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (SC CASC) highlighted one of their funded projects, Time to Restore: Connecting People, Plants, and Pollinators, through the webinar series – The Southern Plains Climate Science Webinar Series.
Watch to learn how this project involves the pollinator restoration community through the entire process to assist them with climate-informed guidance on the timing of nectar plant flowering and seeding. Better knowledge of climate impact on flowering and seed timing for critical nectar plants can inform more resilient restoration plantings.
Jane Breckinridge, the Director of the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators, and Erin Posthumus, the Outreach Coordinator for the USA National Phenology Network and the Principle Investigator of this SC CASC-funded project, will share their perspectives on this project which recently received a second funding award to continue their work.

It's just weird: Reading the Tea Leaves S4, E3
2023-08-09 08:00 - 09:00
View video.
It’s been a weird year so far. The west experienced an exceptionally cool and moist spring, especially in the southern extent of the region. Combined with above average snowpack, fuels stayed moist, and the fire season has had a very slow start. In fact, June saw the lowest area burned since 2000, but despite the slow start over 400 locations in the conterminous US have experienced record temperatures. Moreover, we have seen several weeks of anomalous heat waves, especially in the southwestern US. Yet still the fire season is slower than normal, but fuels are drying out fast.
In this 22-minute webcast, Research Ecologist Dr. Matt Reeves analyzes rangeland fuel conditions across the western US by evaluating the main factors of fuel amount and type, proximity to larger diameter fuel, drought conditions, and level of curing leading to senescent grasses in our simple but transparent hotspot algorithm. All 2022 recordings are located on the Reading the Tea Leaves page.

Why do houses burn in wildfires and what can we do about it?
2023-08-09 09:00 - 10:00
Webinar recording.
Recent destructive wildfires in northern California provide an opportunity to investigate how different factors influence home survival. We conducted an analysis of the 2018 Camp Fire, obtaining measurements from a randomly selected subset of homes in Paradise, to determine if nearby burning structures and/or nearby vegetation contributed to home survival, and whether new building codes in place since 2008 helped. The findings, corroborated by photographs taken of damaged but not destroyed homes, point to changes that could substantially improve outcomes.

Monitoring and removal of invasive grasses for restoration of dry desert systems
2023-08-10 11:00 - 12:00
Webinar recording.
In this webinar, a panel of scientists and practitioners will discuss a number of management techniques and research questions being utilized or tested in an effort to reduce the presence of introduced grasses and restore the historic fire regime. These include:

Researching whether fire historically maintained the clumpy pattern of native vegetation in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Reducing the risk of wildfire severity and extent, retaining native plant communities, and maintaining ecological processes in dry desert systems through a variety of invasive species removal techniques.
Producing fire breaks, or strips of treatment intended to repress the forward progress of wildfires, through restoration of native vegetation patchiness and pruning of native woody species.
Utilizing new technologies to detect invasive grasses and monitor their spread, assess treatment and cost-effectiveness, and present results from a networked experiment that tests vegetation management practices across the southwestern US.

Simulating fire regimes in SpaDES: Parameter estimation for landscape fire models
2023-08-11 08:30 - 09:30
Webinar recording.

Invasive Species Habitat Tool (INHABIT): What, where, and why of invasive plant species
2023-08-11 11:00 - 12:00
Check for webinar recording here.

Nevada SRM Summer Meeting
2023-08-14 - 2023-08-15
Meeting webpage.
Brad Schultz and colleagues will guide us on a tour to several locations where they have located and re-taken photos that were originally taken decades earlier. Topics for discussion will include, but not be limited to, aspen dynamics (is it disappearing or expanding?), expansion/increase of mountain browse species, and responses of higher elevation/higher ppt. sagebrush plant communities to fire! Please bring your own lunch and be prepared to eat on the go (in vehicles). Also be sure to bring plenty of water, snacks, sunscreen, bug stuff, and whatever else you need to spend the day out on rangelands. We will plan to make two outhouse stops at a campground during the tour.

Fires of unusual size: Does it mean what you think it means
2023-08-24 10:00 - 11:00
Webinar recording.
Fires of Unusual Size (FOUS) are large fires that exhibit at least one rapid growth event, and keep growing after that. While “megafire” is widely used and has no specific definition, FOUS are defined by specific characteristics. We can count how many happen each year, and we can ask scientific questions about how they differ from other fires. What makes them so big? What triggered the big growth event(s)? Are they increasing each year? Brian Potter, Research Meteorologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, will talk about the trends, look at how weather influences their growth, and give some examples of unanswered questions about them.

Native seed: Supplying restoration
2023-08-31 07:00 - 08:00
Webinar recording.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in collaboration with the Society of Ecological Restoration’s International Network for Seed-based Restoration (SER-INSR), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Holden Films, produced a series of educational documentaries that explore each step of the native seed supply chain in one of the largest and most sophisticated native seed markets in the world, the Western United States. Episodes of the nine-part series have been released weekly throughout the summer (June 29 – August 24, 2023) and can be viewed on ser-insr.org/native-seed-film.
In this webinar, representatives from BLM, SER-INSR, TNC, and Holden Films will discuss the production of the video series from both a scientific and cinematographic perspective and share stories of this incredible journey.
The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Community Wildfire Mitigation Best Practices: A Virtual Class
2023-09-11
Application required.
The Community Wildfire Mitigation Best Practices training is designed to increase the skills of the professional mitigation practitioner and individuals who run mitigation programs. Participation in the 9-week virtual course is not guaranteed as we endeavor to provide training to individuals who lead or have responsibility for community wildfire mitigation programs. Acceptance is on a per person basis and is not transferable to another person. If there are multiple people from an organization signing up please ensure they sign up individually.

Grassification and fast-evolving fire connectivity and risk in the Sonoran Desert
2023-09-13 12:00 - 13:00
Webinar recording
In the southwestern United States, non-native grass invasions have increased wildfire occurrence in deserts and the likelihood of fire spread to and from other biomes. Wildfires were historically small and infrequent in the warm deserts of western North America, with minimal impact on the desert vegetation. In recent decades, the fire regime has shifted with the spread of non-native grasses. Fires are increasingly burning large areas in desert habitats, largely driven by grassification, the physiognomic conversion of shrublands to grassland by non-native grass invasions. This conversion is especially concentrated at the upper elevational and northern latitudinal boundaries of the Sonoran Desert, which are transition zones to adjacent fire-prone biomes.

Facing Fire: Aesthetics, Environment, and Policy in the West
2023-09-16 18:00 - 20:00
Facing Fire: Aesthetics, Environment, and Policy in the West
The panel discussion was livestreamed and recorded by Utah Public Radio. View the recording here.
A cross-disciplinary panel with artists, policy makers, and a fire fighter to explore how we experience, perceive, respond, and research fire in the West. Following the discussion we will have a reception in the museum to see the new Facing Fire exhibition. Moderated by Brian Steed, PhD., Executive Director, Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air.
Panelists:
Jamie Barnes, Director of Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands
Noah Berger, Wildlife Photographer in Facing Fire
Samantha Fields, Painter in Facing Fire
Eric LaMalfa, PhD., Ecologist
Wade Snyder, Deputy State Fire Management Officer and Former Alta Hotshot

8th Annual SageCon Summit
2023-09-26 - 2023-09-27
Summit webpage.
The summit will be in Lakeview, OR on Sept. 26-27, 2023. There will be in-person and virtual options.

Rising from ashes: A tribe’s nature-based approach to watershed restoration
2023-09-26 - 2023-09-28
Workshop webpage.
Rising from Ashes: A Tribe’s Nature-based Approach to Watershed Restoration will highlight an innovative and iconic case study in public and private collaboration on sovereign tribal lands following a series of catastrophic wildfires. Given the increasing frequency of these fires, there is a vital need to mitigate destruction through preemptive nature-based restoration practices before disaster strikes. By collaborating with federal agencies and other partners to incorporate indigenous knowledge and values into the recovery planning process, the Santa Clara Pueblo is working to achieve long-term, sustainable resiliency of the watershed.
The purpose of this Stewardship in Action Field Workshop is not simply to share what was learned by the Santa Clara Pueblo and their many partners, but also to engage land and water management practitioners from tribal nations, federal and state agencies, and nonprofit organizations from around the continent to share information and leverage success for the benefit of local communities.
The agenda features three days of content featuring both indoor presentations and field experiences. Sessions will explore public and private collaboration on sovereign tribal lands, process-based restoration and watershed resilience, forestry and fire management, sediment stabilization, native plant restoration, indigenous knowledge, nature-based solutions, and preparing for future climate impacts by working together.

10th World Conference on Ecological Restoration
2023-09-26 - 2023-09-30
Conference website.
SER2023 will held in person on 26-30 September 2023 in Darwin, Australia with additional virtual content delivery in the Western Hemisphere time zone during the week of 6 November 2023. The 10th World Conference on Ecological Restoration will focus on the important, and often neglected connection between culture and nature, including the role of restoration in enhancing and rebuilding that connection.

LANDFIRE Office Hours: How IFTDSS is changing the look of fuels planning
2023-09-27 10:00 - 11:00
Webinar recording.
In this LANDFIRE Office Hour, Kim Ernstrom, and Wendy Detwiler, Wildland Fire Management RD&A, Technical Leads IFTDSS (and Josh Hyde: Tech Transfer Specialist, University of Idaho) discuss the basics of using IFTDSS for fuels planning. We also discuss practical examples of how IFTDSS is being used in the field.

Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment (CO-WRA)- Overview and technical discussion
2023-09-27 12:00 - 14:00
Webinar recording.
This webinar will provide an overview of the major changes in CO-WRA, including modification of Scott and Burgan (2005) standard fire behavior fuel models to better reflect fuel types in Colorado, incorporating LiDAR to produce higher spatial resolution data products, and advanced wildland-urban interface risk analysis. Presenters will explain how these datasets and information can be used to: (1) increase public awareness about wildfire risk; (2) support wildfire risk reduction efforts, decision-making, and research from state to local scales; (3) identify high priority areas; (4) assist in the development of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and other hazard mitigation plans; and (5) complement forest stewardship and forest management plans.
After a brief review, presenters will explore discussions and questions from participants to address technical issues.

University of Idaho Rangeland Fall Forum 2023
2023-10-05 - 2023-10-06
Forum webpage.
This year’s forum will be held in Boise, ID with a symposium on October 5 and a field tour on October 6.

Prescribed burns as a tool to mitigate future wildfire smoke exposures
2023-10-11 11:00 - 12:00
Webinar recording.
Catastrophic wildfires in the western United States pose significant risks to public health, infrastructure, and ecosystems. As these wildfires become more frequent, there is a growing need for a common methodology to identify suitable locations for prescribed burning aimed at mitigating future wildfire impacts to affected populations and ecosystems. This presentation explores the use of atmospheric chemistry transport modeling, satellite observations, and data from land managers to assess the effectiveness of prescribed burning interventions in reducing potential future wildfire smoke exposure. The presenter will offer lessons for states and rural environmental justice communities through a discussion on how implementing preventative prescribed burns in heavily forested areas such as Northern California and the Pacific Northwest may yield substantial net benefits for air quality across the entire western US, while similar interventions in other states would result in comparatively smaller impacts.

New standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration: Views from science and practice
2023-10-16 10:00 - 11:00
Webinar recording.
The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) has co-authored a new set of “Standards of Practice to Guide Ecosystem Restoration”, launched this year in partnership with the FAO and IUCN-CEM as a contribution to the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Furthermore, various principles and standards guidance have been released or are under development since 2019, including the WWF-SER Mediterranean forest project certification standards, aiming to verify the quality of field-based restoration projects, providing guidance, structure, and an auditing process for ecological restoration.
In this SUPERB/IUFRO Forest Restoration Talk, organised in collaboration with SER, George Gann, SER’s International Policy Lead, presents an overview of the new Standards of Practice including insights from the Mediterranean project, discussing how these can support the design, implementation, and funding of restoration actions.
He is joined by Dr.Michael Kleine, Deputy Executive Director & Coordinator at IUFRO’s Special Programme for Development of Capacities, who provides views from a science and training perspective with reference to existing forest-related restoration guidelines, sharing experiences with implementing some of these on the ground.

Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition 19th Annual Meeting
2023-11-01 - 2023-11-03
Meeting website.
The 2023 RVCC Annual Meeting will be an in-person event, at the beautiful Stanford Sierra Conference Center at Fallen Leaf Lake in South Lake Tahoe, California. Please save the date: November 1-3, 2023!

State of the science: Smoke
2023-11-01 09:00 - 10:30
Webinar recording.
Science to support the Wildfire Crisis Strategy
Land management-focused panel discussion with smoke experts
Hosted by the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station

Western Governors' Association - 2023 Winter Meeting
2023-11-06 - 2023-11-08
Meeting webpage.
The 2023 Winter Meeting, hosted by Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, will feature the Western Governors and their special guests in public conversations about the most significant issues facing the region. It will be in Jackson Hole, WY.
