Webinar
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.
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.
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In this webinar, you will learn: what a CWPP is and why your community may need one, what the process involves and what the components are, what resources you need to complete a CWPP, cost ranges for contractors vs in-house, how to use CWPPs to support funding for implementation and more!
Webinar recording.
A practitioner-oriented overview of LANDFIRE with a focus on fuels and how they react to modeling techniques. The subject area of discussion will be the 2022 Cooks Peak fire located in northern New Mexico. This webinar will be technical in its application and may offer insights for both beginner and advanced LANDFIRE users.
Presenters: Tobin Smail, LANDFIRE Next Gen Fuels Lead, USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station Fire Modeling Institute; and Charley Martin, LANDFIRE Fuels, TSSC Contract USGS/KBR
Webinar recording.
The sagebrush biome is one of the largest habitat types in North America, spanning 175 million acres and home to sage grouse and 350 other species. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) launched the Sage Grouse Initiative in 2010 to deliver win-win voluntary conservation solutions that support ranchers and other landowners in improving the productivity of their working lands while benefiting sage grouse. The Initiative has successfully addressed key threats impacting sage grouse by focusing on population core areas. Science has helped strategically guide, refine, and inform these voluntary, private lands conservation efforts across 11 western states.
Webinar recording.
Join the authors to learn more about how media in all forms can report diverse stories of fire, including strategies for physical and mental preparedness, engaging with incident personnel, and using scientific knowledge. Participants will also have the opportunity to provide feedback and suggest future ways to further enhance the capacity of media, public information officers, and scientists to work together.
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Presenters will share an overall framework, analysis considerations plus a case study from the Southwest Idaho Wildfire Crisis Landscape. Manager questions and experiences to guide this session are encouraged.
Webinar recording.
Cara Applestein, Samuel “Jake” Price, and Matt Germino, USGS, present their latest work on accuracy assessments of the newest mapped products for burned areas. They will give guidelines for reliable application, including stating what is “unsafe” application, what the scientific basis for the guidelines are, and examples of how they use the data. They will address RAP, RCMAP, and LandCart.
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
Webinar registration.
Presenters: John Kim, USDA Forest Service
Alex Dye, Oregon State University
Description: Fire is an integral part of the disturbance regime of the Pacific Northwest’s moist temperate forests, but future fire patterns for this region remain uncertain. Using Energy Release Component (ERC) from 12 global climate models (GCM), we simulated thousands of plausible fire seasons with the fire spread model FSim for mid-21st century (2035-2064) for 5 northwestern pyromes. Projected changes to burn probability, fire size, and number of fires varied among pyromes and GCMs. The largest increases in burn probability and fire size occur in the cooler and wetter northern parts of the region (North Cascades, Olympics & Puget Lowlands) and Oregon West Cascades, with more moderate changes projected for the Washington West Cascades and Oregon Coast Range. We provide new insights into changing fire regimes characterized by the possibility of shifts towards more frequent large fires (especially > 40,000 ha), and shifts in seasonality, including more fires burning at the beginning of fall when extreme synoptic weather events have the potential to increase fire spread and fire’s impact on communities. Our work highlights the potential geographic variability in climate change effects in the Northwest, pointing to a rapid acceleration of fire in the coming decades for which current wildfire risk reduction strategies based on recent historical data, and not climate change or rare events, may be insufficient.
Risk assessments that account for climate change and rare events can help prepare expectations for how future changes to fire regimes will impact communities, and we explore these impacts using two different methods for the present and future time periods. We used building location data to evaluate community wildfire exposure and identify plausible disasters that are not based on mean-based statistical approaches. Nearly half of communities are vulnerable to a future disaster, and the magnitude of plausible disasters exceeds any recent historical events. Ignitions on private land are most likely to result in very high community exposure. We also conducted a screening of wildfire evacuation vulnerability for 696 Oregon and Washington rural towns. By combining the road and fire metrics, we score and rank all towns by their overall evacuation vulnerability. Many of the most vulnerable towns are located in remote, forested, mountainous terrain, where topographic relief constrains the available road network and high fuel loads increase wildfire hazard. Work is underway to characterize how the vulnerabilities shift by mid-century.