Webinar
Presenters: Dinyar Minocher and Roy Vera-Velez
When we recognize fire as an integral component of grassland and parkland ecosystems, addressing constraints on fire application and halting the decline of prairies’ health become crucial. Controlled burns applied strategically by land managers can restore historical fire regimes and promote the growth of native grasses, forbs, and wildflowers while mitigating the encroachment of woody species. Conducting prescribed burns also helps reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires that can cause vast damage to human communities and the environment. Despite this, understanding both the ecological consequences of fire deficit and suppression, and the obstacles behind reimplementing safe fire on the prairie landscape remains a significant challenge. These difficulties limit the development of informed strategies to restore and maintain the health of these ecosystems.
Join us as Dinyar and Roy discuss the role of the Canadian Prairies Prescribed Fire Exchange (CPPFE) as an avenue that enables various organizations, landowners, and groups to adopt effective fire practices. Learn more about the grassland fire research database, a key initiative of the CPPFE designed to disseminate the most relevant scientific information available to fire practitioners. Dinyar and Roy will also outline the latest findings from a quantitative analysis of the grassland fire research database, examining the impact of fire on both grassland productivity and diversity.
Dinyar Minocher used to fight fires for the province of Alberta and Parks Canada and was the Fire Operations Coordinator at Grasslands National Park. Now, Dinyar leads the CPPFE. Roy Vera-Velez has a PhD in grassland ecology, with his post-doc looking at the effects of fire on forage quality, diversity, and productivity.
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The South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (SC CASC) highlighted one of their funded projects, Time to Restore: Connecting People, Plants, and Pollinators, through the webinar series – The Southern Plains Climate Science Webinar Series.
Watch to learn how this project involves the pollinator restoration community through the entire process to assist them with climate-informed guidance on the timing of nectar plant flowering and seeding. Better knowledge of climate impact on flowering and seed timing for critical nectar plants can inform more resilient restoration plantings.
Jane Breckinridge, the Director of the Tribal Alliance for Pollinators, and Erin Posthumus, the Outreach Coordinator for the USA National Phenology Network and the Principle Investigator of this SC CASC-funded project, will share their perspectives on this project which recently received a second funding award to continue their work.
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The National CASC hosted a webinar series on how to integrate Indigenous Knowledges (IK) into Federal research and resource management programs. It ran bi-weekly from April 6 to June 1, 2023 and centers Indigenous voices to explore ethical, legal, and scientific considerations for working within different knowledge systems and provides guidance reflecting best practices.
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Zander Evans will present an overview of the 10 largest fires in the Southwest during 2022. He will share summaries of forest types and burn severities for each of the 10 fires. Rich Naden, Fire Weather Meteorologist with National Park Service, will discuss the fire season outlook for the Southwest in 2023.
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The Yellowstone fires of 1988 are considered an early fire event signaling the rise of the wildfire crisis we are experiencing today. After building for decades, the crisis erupted in the 2000s as wildfires destroyed lives, homes, and communities on a rising scale. The national response, though initially swift, has not kept pace with the growing impact of catastrophic wildfires. In January 2022, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a 10-year strategy for confronting the wildfire crisis in the United States (Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests).
At the core of the strategy is ramping up fuel and forest health treatments across land ownerships to match the scale of wildfire risk. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and the wildland fire community have laid the foundation for collaboration across landscapes to reduce wildfire risk. Recent influxes in funding, including new funding authorities in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, are helping fuel and forest health projects hit the ground on priority landscapes and high risk “firesheds.”
For decades the Rocky Mountain Research Station has focused on fire science studying topics relevant to wildfire hazard, risk, behavior, and ecology, and providing knowledge support to land managers and a myriad of partners. The expertise and tools developed over decades by RMRS is now central to providing a scientific basis to addressing the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. This series of hour-long seminars took place January 12 – March 23, 2023, to share the individual contributions of RMRS scientists to the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.
Webinar recording.
In this LANDFIRE Office Hour, Kim Ernstrom, and Wendy Detwiler, Wildland Fire Management RD&A, Technical Leads IFTDSS (and Josh Hyde: Tech Transfer Specialist, University of Idaho) discuss the basics of using IFTDSS for fuels planning. We also discuss practical examples of how IFTDSS is being used in the field.
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This webinar will provide an overview of the major changes in CO-WRA, including modification of Scott and Burgan (2005) standard fire behavior fuel models to better reflect fuel types in Colorado, incorporating LiDAR to produce higher spatial resolution data products, and advanced wildland-urban interface risk analysis. Presenters will explain how these datasets and information can be used to: (1) increase public awareness about wildfire risk; (2) support wildfire risk reduction efforts, decision-making, and research from state to local scales; (3) identify high priority areas; (4) assist in the development of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and other hazard mitigation plans; and (5) complement forest stewardship and forest management plans.
Webinar recording.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in collaboration with the Society of Ecological Restoration’s International Network for Seed-based Restoration (SER-INSR), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Holden Films, produced a series of educational documentaries that explore each step of the native seed supply chain in one of the largest and most sophisticated native seed markets in the world, the Western United States. Episodes of the nine-part series have been released weekly throughout the summer (June 29 – August 24, 2023) and can be viewed on ser-insr.org/native-seed-film.
In this webinar, representatives from BLM, SER-INSR, TNC, and Holden Films will discuss the production of the video series from both a scientific and cinematographic perspective and share stories of this incredible journey.
The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Webinar recording.
Fires of Unusual Size (FOUS) are large fires that exhibit at least one rapid growth event, and keep growing after that. While “megafire” is widely used and has no specific definition, FOUS are defined by specific characteristics. We can count how many happen each year, and we can ask scientific questions about how they differ from other fires. What makes them so big? What triggered the big growth event(s)? Are they increasing each year? Brian Potter, Research Meteorologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, will talk about the trends, look at how weather influences their growth, and give some examples of unanswered questions about them.