Webinar
Webinar recording.
According to the August 2, 2022 U.S. Drought Monitor, 39.5% of the Pacific Northwest Drought Early Warning System (DEWS) is in drought. A very wet spring and early summer has greatly improved conditions compared to March, when over 70% of the region was in drought. However, a large part of Oregon is still in Extreme (D3)/Exceptional (D4) Drought, as are pockets in Idaho. This webinar will provide more information on the current conditions and outlooks, as well as two presentations on OpenET.
These webinars provide the region’s stakeholders and interested parties with timely information on current and developing drought conditions, as well as climatic events like El Niño and La Niña. Speakers will also discuss the impacts of these conditions on things such as wildfires, floods, disruption to water supply and ecosystems, as well as impacts to affected industries like agriculture, tourism, and public health.
Webinar recording.
Join presenter Erica Fisher for a summary of what we know so far about how structures in wildfires influence our water infrastructure and what can be done to potentially stop further contamination from wildfire events.
Webinar recording.
Increasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. This presentation will summarize a recently published article in Current Environmental Health Reports that details how and why scientists, planners, foresters and fire managers, fire safety, air quality, and public health practitioners must collaboratively work together. This article is the result of a series of transdisciplinary conversations to find common ground and subsequently provide a holistic view of how forest and fire management intersect with human health through the impacts of smoke and articulate the need for an integrated approach to both planning and practice.
Webinar recording.
The cool wet spring across much of the northwestern US has created a sea of cheatgrass that has improved fuelbed continuity and fuel loading, often exceeding 200 percent of normal. As a result we expect the potential for grass driven wildfires, especially in the Snake River Plain, eastern Washington, northwestern Nevada and northeastern California to be at least average to considerably above average.
Webinar recording.
Wotton, Canadian Forest Service, explains lightning fire ignition and the important processes that determine the day-to-day variation of this important source of summertime fire activity in Canada. This presentation is for both academic and operational audiences in Canada’s wildfire community.
Examples from models developed and used in Ontario’s fire occurrence prediction system were provided as well as some comparisons to similar model development in other regions of the country. Reviewing the history and operational use of these models in Ontario provides useful examples of the challenges and opportunities (and ultimately the long-term investment required) in getting research into operational use in wildland fire management.
Webinar recording.
Description: This webinar will provide an introduction and overview of the FlamMap modeling system and its new capabilities with focus on several new additions:
- Landscape Utility for the creation and extraction of LANDFIRE based landscape files
- Spatial version of the First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM)
- Additional support for raster formats
- GeoTIFFs now supported when generating landscapes
- Save Raster Outputs as Single GeoTIFF File
- Measure Tool
- New tools to edit and graph weather
Presenter: Chuck McHugh, Fire Spatial Analyst, USFS RMRS Missoula Fire Sciences Lab
Webinar recording.
Smoke from wildfires is becoming a reality that individuals and communities face each fire season. Want to learn how you can protect yourself and those you care about from wildfire smoke? In this webinar, we talk about smoke impacts to human health, how to access important air quality information and how to differentiate between the levels of air quality. We also cover things you can do right now to prepare.
Webinar recording.
This webinar presents research which provides insight on how the economic returns from proactive wildfire mitigation could be improved. The research team produced an economic assessment of Denver’s Forests to Faucets partnership, a collaboration which invested >$60 million in wildfire mitigation projects between 2011 and 2019. The research, combining wildfire modeling, sediment modeling, and primary and secondary data on economic values, quantified the impact of the actual investments on multiple values at risk. Large benefits to source water protection and other values at risk resulted from these proactive investments but the benefits only exceed the costs of funding wildfire mitigation under certain conditions.
Webinar recording.
Destructive wildfires are now a real threat in regions across the country and beyond what was once considered as the fire season, examples of which are the 2016 Gatlinburg Fire in the Southeast and the 2021 Marshall Fire in late December. Existing wildfire risk assessment procedures typically use simulation modeling to quantify the wildfire exposure to wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities, but rely on subjective estimates of the susceptibility of structures to fire in order to quantify risk. Thus, there is a need to better understand and characterize the effectiveness of different mitigation actions related to individual structure features and community layout on the resilience of a WUI community to fire. This presentation discusses findings from the analyses of past wildfire events and introduces a streamlined model to capture fire spread inside WUI communities to quantify structural damage. The proposed model can be used to guide mitigation actions in existing and new communities, and inform preparedness and response strategies by evaluating the likelihood of successful suppression based on the rate of fire spread.
Webinar recording.
Description: This presentation discusses a partnership between the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (PLPT) in northern Nevada and a team of university-based scientists. The research team engaged PLPT stakeholder groups through workshops, interviews, and focus groups to understand how climate change and upstream pressures threaten PLPT ecosystems, lands, and resources. Stakeholders emphasized that climate change planning must be grounded in and informed by Indigenous knowledge practices and protocols, in conjunction with decolonizing approaches to climate adaptation research that returns agency to the PLPT.
Presenters: Schuyler Chew is Mohawk Wolf clan from Six Nations Grand River and grew up on the Tuscarora Nation. As an environmental scientist, he is committed to partnering with Indigenous communities on climate adaptation research. His dissertation research on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s resilience to climate change was funded in part by the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Karletta Chief (Diné) is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Arizona, and is also the Director of the Indigenous Resilience Center (IRC). As an Extension Specialist, she works to bring relevant water science to Native American communities in a culturally sensitive manner, and at the IRC she aims to facilitate efforts of UArizona climate/environment researchers, faculty, staff, and students working with Native Nations to build resiliency to climate impacts and environmental challenges.