Webinar
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This webinar was originally presented August 29, 2018 11am AZ/12pm MDT by Kimiko Barrett of Headwaters Economics.
As wildfires increase in size and severity, the costs to protect homes and lives similarly rise. Yet protecting communities represents a relatively small portion of the total costs of a wildfire—other short- and long-term impacts yield a variety of costs that often go unrecognized. In an analysis of five case studies—the Hayman (2002), Old, Grand Prix, and Padua Complex (2003), Schultz (2010), Rim (2013), and Loma fires (2016)—suppression costs averaged nine percent of total wildfire costs; additional short-term expenses and long-term damages accounted for 91 percent of total wildfire costs. Nearly half of all wildfire costs are paid at the local level by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and homeowners. The remaining wildfire costs are paid at the state and federal level, or are paid by a combination of local, state, and federal organizations. Overall, short-term expenses such as suppression, relief aid, evacuation services, and home and property loss comprise around 35 percent of total wildfire costs. Long-term damages, which can take years to fully manifest, account for approximately 65 percent of total wildfire costs. Although wildfire costs greatly vary depending on factors within the built and unbuilt environment, increasing trends in climate change and development patterns favoring high-wildfire-risk areas suggest a parallel rise in total wildfire costs. Planning new communities and developments with consideration of wildfire risk is one way to accommodate growth while living alongside wildfires.
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Land managers are challenged to protect cultural resources within the context of reintroducing fire on the landscape. Positive relationships and partnerships are essential to effective management.
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USU Forestry Extension and the Southern Rockies Science Network present this special webinar: Prescribed fire is an essential management tool for restoring and maintaining fire-dependent ecosystems; however, land managers are unable to apply prescribed fire at the necessary levels. Past surveys have identified a range of policies and regulations that managers say limit their ability to conduct prescribed fire. We are conducting a project investigating barriers to prescribed fire across the West for the BLM and the US Forest Service. Our goals are to identify the origin and range of interpretation of perceived policy barriers (i.e. whether these reside in law, agency guidance, culture, or individual discretion) and characterize the opportunities and mechanisms that are available to overcome barriers at various scales. The first phase of our project involved a legal analysis and interviews across the 11 Western states with BLM and Forest Service fire and fuels managers and state-level air quality regulators. We report on the diversity of regulatory approaches, policy barriers, and strategies for overcoming challenges across the West, based on our legal review and interviews. While air quality regulation limits managers’ ability to conduct prescribed fire, it is only one of many issues that managers say affect their programs; other significant challenges include capacity limitations, a lack of incentives to increase accomplishments, and individual risk aversion.
The ecological effects of wildland fire – also termed the fire severity – are often highly heterogeneous in space and time. This heterogeneity is a result of spatial variability in factors such as fuel, topography, and climate (e.g. a map of mean annual temperature). However, temporally variable factors such as daily weather and climatic extremes (e.g. an unusually warm year) also may play a key role. We conducted a study in which statistical models were produced describing fire severity as a function of live fuel, topography, climate, and fire weather. On average, live fuel was the most influential factor driving fire severity, followed by fire weather, climate, and topography. The statistical models we produced were then used to generate maps depicting the probability of high-severity fire, if a fire were to occur, for several ecoregions in the western US. These maps can potentially be used by land management agencies to prioritize hazardous fuel reduction treatments. This webinar pertains to all mountainous regions of the western US but will slightly emphasize the southwestern US.
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The Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) is a free, online tool that helps landowners and natural resource managers track vegetation through time and plan actions to improve America’s grazing lands. The RAP can be used to provide strategies to improve productivity of grazing lands, manage weeds, mitigate impacts of wildfire and drought, and benefit wildlife habitats. Powered by Google Earth Engine, RAP merges machine learning and cloud-based computing with remote sensing and field data to provide the first-ever annual cover maps of rangeland vegetation. This new platform allows people to view trends in rangeland resources at an unprecedented blend of space (from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean), time (1984 to present), and scale (at the ranch, watershed, or county level). Designed to be combined with local knowledge, the RAP helps users better understand vegetation change through time to aid in conservation planning and outcome evaluation. This webinar will describe the innovative breakthrough in mapping vegetation cover and demonstrate RAP applications.
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The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Office of Policy Analysis has invited LANDFIRE, to present a seminar, Foundational All-Lands Data for Improving Decisions in Land Management, on September 10, 2018, in Washington, D.C. as part of their Seminar Series. The presentation is open to the public via webcast; the recorded event will also be posted to the Office of Policy Analysis website.
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Webinar presented by Faith Ann Heinsch, S&K Global Solutions, RMRS Missoula Fire Lab
The webinar described major changes from version 5 to version 6, showed sample Runs demonstrating these changes, provided suggestions for calculating surface fire behavior using BehavePlus v6, described how changes in BehavePlus affect NWCG courses that use this program (e.g., S-490; RX-301/341), and provided ways to get additional information.
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How could have so many homes and businesses burned so quickly in the Wine Country Fires? While the landscape can be the fuse, the homes really can be the most burnable part of the landscape. For this webinar we’ll talk about key lesson that can be learned from these northern California fires and how we can help our homes and landscapes to become more resilient to wildfires. This webinar will bring forward information about fire preparedness, building design, construction and maintenance in with an emphasis identifying and managing the fuels near our homes (e.g. combustible wood mulches used in landscaping, lawn furniture, leaf accumulations, dry landscape plants, etc.), especially in the 5 feet immediately adjacent to our homes.
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This webinar examined current methods of funding species conservation efforts, as well as challenges and opportunities to leveraging additional funding for conservation of at-risk and endangered species. Moderator: Timothy Male, Executive Director at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center. Panelists: Christy Plumer, Chief Conservation Officer, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership; Virgil Moore, Director, Idaho Department of Fish and Game and Gary Frazer, Assistant Director for Endangered Species, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This webinar is part the Species Conservation and ESA Initiative.
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This webinar examined how critical habitat designations are influenced by invasive species. Moderator: Chuck Bonham, Director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Panelists: Dr. David Sweet, Yellowstone Lake Special Project Manager, Wyoming Trout Unlimited; Matt Morrison, Chief Executive Officer, Pacific Northwest Economic Region; Chris Crookshanks, Native Aquatics Staff Specialist, Nevada Department of Wildlife. This webinar is one in a series for the “Species Conservation and Endangered Species Act Initiative,” the Chairman’s Initiative of Wyoming Governor and Western Governors’ Association Chairman Matt Mead.