Webinar
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.
Webinar recording.
To aid practitioners in planning and implementing conservation actions, we recently developed the Grassland and Sagebrush Conservation Portal in the web platform, ArcGIS Online. This portal provides access to geospatial resources such maps, apps, and data developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners as well as other open-access resources. We intend to grow the resources in the portal in ways that are complementary to other online platforms. The Service’s development team will provide a tour of the portal, answer questions, and ask for suggestions for relevant resources that could be added.
The webinar will be presented by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service team that developed the Grassland and Sagebrush Conservation Portal. For questions, please contact [email protected]
Webinar recording.
Description: Worldwide, Indigenous peoples are leading the revitalization of their/our cultures through the restoration of ecosystems in which they are embedded, including in response to increasing “megafires.” Yet, despite growing recognition that just and effective conservation is only possible through partnerships with, or led by, Indigenous peoples, decolonizing approaches to restoration have received insufficient attention. Further, reconciliation will be incomplete without Indigenous-led restoration of Indigenous lands, knowledges, and cultures. In this webinar, we will introduce the concept of “walking on two legs” to guide restoration scientists and practitioners in advancing the interconnected processes of Indigenous-led restoration and reconciliation in Indigenous territories. As an action-oriented framework articulated by Secwépemc Elder Ronald E. Ignace, “walking on two legs” seeks to bring Indigenous knowledges into balance with western scientific knowledge in service of upholding an Indigenous stewardship ethic that is embedded in Indigenous ways of relating to land and embodies principles of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. Grounding our discussion in the context of fire-adapted ecosystems of western Canada and unceded and traditional Secwépemc territory, Secwepemcúl̓ecw, we will share two case studies of collaborative and Indigenous-led research and restoration to demonstrate how “walking on two legs” provides a pathway to uphold respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and territories through Indigenous-led restoration.
Presenters: Marianne Ignace, Director, Indigenous Languages Program and First Nations Language Centre, Simon Fraser University
Sarah Disckson-Hoyle, PhD candidate and Public Scholar, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia
Webinar recording.
Description: A recent collaboration by ~90 tree-ring and fire-scar scientists has resulted in the publication of the newly compiled North American Tree-Ring Fire-Scar Network* (NAFSN), which contains 2,562 sites, > 37,000 fire-scarred trees, and covers large parts of North America. In this publication, authors investigate the NAFSN in terms of geography, sample depth, vegetation, topography, climate, and human land use.
In this webinar presenters will present major findings from the publication, demonstrate data accessibility, highlight management applications, and discuss future steps planned for the NAFSN.
Presenter: Ellis Margolis, Research Ecologist, USGS Fort Collins Science Center and Dr. Christopher Guiterman, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) University of Colorado at Boulder, and NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)
Webinar recording.
Passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Forest Service’s 10-year Wildfire Strategy signal a new era of historic investments in ecosystem restoration and wildfire risk reduction in the western U.S. But as initial projects and implementation plans are announced, the opportunities for community-based prescribed fire practitioners and advocates to engage in and inform the strategic expansion of prescribed fire continues to be unclear. In this session, we will:
- Unpack the complex terrain of federal policymaking entities and venues that will influence federal wildfire and fuels reduction strategies.
- Review RVCC’s and partners’ collective prescribed fire and cooperative burning advocacy interests and recommendations.
- Identify opportunities for engagement, coalition-building, and advocacy using existing or new venues and strategies.