Webinar
Webinar recording.
It seems the effects of climate change were all too clear in 2021. Yet, we know more change is expected. When trying to adapt to a changing climate, with all the inherent uncertainties about how the future may play out, resource managers often turn to scenario planning as a tool. Managers use scenario planning to explore plausible ways the climate may change, allowing them to work with climate change uncertainty rather than being paralyzed by it. Once identified, scenarios of the future are used to develop proactive measures to prepare for and adapt to scenarios of change.
A key part of scenario planning is generating a list of potential future climates we may deal with. These ‘climate futures’ serve as the foundation of each scenario explored in the planning process. For example, managers consider how they would respond to a warm, wet versus a hot, dry future. This webinar will describe and compare three approaches to generate the climate futures that feed into the scenario planning process. In doing so, this work identifies an approach to developing climate futures that captures a broad range of climate conditions (a key ingredient to developing scenarios) across both near and long-term planning horizons.
Webinar recording.
The increasing incidence of large wildfires with extensive stand-replacing effects across the southwestern United States is altering the contemporary forest management template within historically frequent-fire conifer forests. While management of fire-excluded forests continues to be a priority for land managers, an increasing fraction of western conifer forests have recently burned. Many of these burned landscapes contain complex mosaics of surviving forest and severely-burned patches without surviving or regenerating conifer trees. In such complex landscapes, postfire management decisions may be more effective when based on a spatially-explicit assessment of the mosaic of surviving forest and severely burned patches. Such a decision-making framework includes detailed considerations both for postfire fuels management, e.g., edge hardening of surviving forest patches and repeat burning, and for postfire reforestation, e.g., nucleation planting strategies to establish “islands” of seed trees, spatial planning to optimize reforestation success, tradeoffs between intensive and extensive tree planting, and improving nursery capacity. The decision-making framework developed here can be integrated with existing postfire management infrastructure to optimize allocation of limited resources while not abandoning recently burned landscapes, which will continue to expand in a future of increasing fire activity.
Webinar recording.
The 2020 Cameron Peak Fire burned more than 200,000 acres of public and private land in northern Colorado making it the largest fire recorded in Colorado’s history. Extreme fire behavior driven by dense and dry fuels, steep terrain, and weather and climatic factors greatly affected the range of potential management strategies. Many different communities were affected by the fire from smoke, repeated and long-term evacuations, emotional distress, and property impacts. Social science researchers at Colorado State University, in conjunction with the USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station, interviewed more than 50 landowners and residents in communities directly impacted by the Cameron Peak Fire to understand and share their experiences and perspectives. Join this webinar to learn about people’s attitudes on the communication and fire management strategies, their perceptions of post-fire landscape recovery and forest health, and their support for future forest and fire management.
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NV Section of the Society for Rangeland Management is hosting an all-day webinar.
Webinar recording.
Overview: This presentation will share key findings from a recent Joint Fire Science Project, specifically on: 1) the multiple types of boundaries in managing wildfire risk, and the boundary spanning features that can help cross them; 2) what strategies actors utilized for wildfire risk reduction across five case studies in the West; and 3) questions and ideas for future research and practice. This work is intended to help wildfire practitioners and managers better understand and address these organizational complexities as they work toward greater collective impact.
Presenters: Heidi Huber-Stearns, University of Oregon; Emily Jane Davis, Oregon State University; Tony Cheng, Colorado State University
Symposium recording.
Full symposium agenda.
USGS will hold a Bi-State Sage-Grouse Science Symposium. This virtual symposium will highlight the research, science, and management tools that support sage-grouse monitoring and conservation efforts in the Bi-State area of California and Nevada. Pete Coates and Western Ecological Research Center staff members will present information on:
- Population trends for greater sage-grouse within the Bi-State DPS and across sage-grouse range
- Seasonal and life-stage mapping of sage-grouse habitat in the Bi-State DPS
- Sage-grouse response to wildfire
- Impacts of increases of feral horse and common raven populations on sage-grouse populations
- Lessons learned from sage-grouse translocation efforts
- A targeted annual warning system to inform adaptive management of sage-grouse populations
- Efficacy of conservation efforts to improve sage-grouse population performance within the Bi-State DPS
Webinar recording.
Hear from tribal representatives who work in a variety of roles related to fire stewardship, research and management. These panelists share their goals around managing and stewarding fire, their perspectives on how scientists and managers can help ensure that collaborative fire projects meet the goals of tribal communities, how non-tribal scientists and managers can build trust with tribal communities, and the social and ecological challenges they face in their work.
Webinar recording.
This webinar will introduce the recent release of the EPA Report on Comparing Air Quality and Public Health Impacts from Prescribed Fire and Wildfire Smoke.
Jason Sacks, with the Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment, Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will present an overview of the studies that provided the information for this report aimed at helping federal, state, local and Tribal partners and fire organizations make risk management decisions to reduce the impacts of wildfire smoke in their communities.
Webinar recording.
This 1-hour webinar presents findings from a recently completed study, which was funded by the Joint Fire Science Program, on landscape fuel treatment effectiveness within recent large wildfire events in north-central Washington State. It provides an overview of climate change and wildfires and the imperative for broad-scale adaptive management to increase landscape and community resilience to future wildfires. Then reports findings on the effects of prior fuel reduction treatments, biophysical environment, and weather on fire severity. The study also evaluated fireline effectiveness and how past fuel treatments assisted in safe and effective response.