Fire Communication & Education
The purpose of this webinar is to review 2019 fires and look ahead toward conditions for 2020. Dr. Zander Evans presented an overview of the largest fires in the Southwest during 2019. He will share summaries of forest types and burn severities for each of the fires. In addition, Rich Naden, Fire Weather Meteorologist with the Southwest Coordination Center, discussed the fire season outlook for 2020 in the Southwest.
Visit the workshop website for more information.
The 4th Annual National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy Workshop theme was: Hard truths, fantastic failures and magnificent successes of cross-boundary, landscape level and community-wide implementation and focused on the following themes:
- Significant wildland fire events that are changing the way future fires are addressed,
- “Fantastic Failures” where alignment of ideas and resources did not produce the desired outcomes,
- “Magnificent Successes” where collaborative, cross-boundary collaboration, prioritization and investments have led to better wildland fire and landscape scale outcomes.
View article.
Wildfires are increasingly common in the United States, the result of climate change, altered wildfire regimes, and expanding residential development in close proximity to wildland vegetation. Both suppression expenditures and damages are increasing as a result. Accelerating wildfire losses have been observed in other countries as well: Australia, Canada, Chile, Greece, and Portugal have all experienced record destruction due to wildfires in the past decade. Reducing wildfire losses is a daunting goal requiring a multi-part strategy across all levels of government. In the U.S., federal fire policy seeks to: create resilient landscapes and vegetation; use effective and efficient suppression; and promote fire-adapted communities where human populations and infrastructure can withstand wildfire, reducing loss of life and property.
In this webinar, Matt Jolly (Research Ecologist, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station) presents the structure and function of the current version of the US National Fire Danger Rating, NFDRS2016. He shows how this system can be used to assess seasonal variations in fuel moisture and fire potential and how it can be used to quantify fire season severity anywhere in the country. Jolly demonstrates the use of FireFamily+ Version 5.0 to explore local fire weather conditions and suggests ways to use both tabular and graphical displays to communicate fire danger conditions to a variety of audiences such as firefighters, IMT members, fire management officers, line officers and the public. Finally, he introduces new spatial fire danger assessment tools and discuss the future of NFDRS.
One mechanism with which communities-at-risk from wildfire have addressed planning and adaptation to wildfire are Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs), which were created as part of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act in 2003. CWPPs are required to include measures to reduce hazardous fuels, reduce structural ignitability, and increase collaboration and outreach. Communities across the Western U.S. have used a wide range of approaches for developing CWPPs with varying outcomes. This webinar will provide results from a study that assessed CWPPs in Arizona and other western states. It will include results from an assessment of CWPP effectiveness in Arizona, results from a survey of CWPP program strategies in other western states, as well as lessons learned and recommendations for effective CWPP development, implementation, and management.
View article.
This article examines salient topics and textual silences in the media coverage of two major wildfires in Washington State. A significant body of research has examined the importance of media coverage in framing disaster events, yet gaps remain in scholarly understanding of wildfire media coverage. In this article, we explore the following questions: How did the print media cover the Carlton Complex and Okanogan Complex fires in Washington State? What topics and locations were generally featured or ignored, and why? How did wildfire media coverage change after firefighter deaths? To answer these questions, we draw on three sources of data: print media coverage, address-specific data of burned homes, and demographic descriptions of impacted towns. We find that media coverage largely overlooked sites of greatest loss, failed to provide a contextualized discussion of firefighter safety, and generally ignored issues of climate change and inequality.
Read the report.
In December of 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator requested the Department of Homeland Security DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) research new and emerging technology that could be applied to wildland fire incident response, given the loss of life that occurred in California during the fall of 2017 in Santa Rosa and Ventura.
In response to the request, DHS S&T—in collaboration with FEMA, the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), and other key stakeholder experts—determined wildland urban interface (WUI) incidents and life-saving functions as the optimal areas for DHS S&T to explore technology innovation. As a result, S&T formed an Integrated Project Team (IPT) and initiated the WUI Fire Operational Requirements and Technology Capability Analysis Project. Over the course of the project, the IPT identified areas of innovation in wildland fire incident relating to wildland fire preparedness and mitigation and enhanced wildland fire suppression practices, including resistant infrastructure planning, building materials, and building codes. To meet the Administrator’s request, however, the IPT focused its efforts on requirements for improving operational capabilities and incident response to save lives in WUI fires.
View the article.
This study brought together ecologists and social scientists to confront this challenge and consider how to better promote both social and ecological resilience to a more flammable world. The result led to the new insights highlighted in the paper “Rethinking resilience to wildfire” – that catastrophic wildfires are forcing us to rethink what social–ecological resilience to wildfire means, and accept that more diverse approaches to resilience thinking are needed to facilitate human coexistence with wildfire.
Read article.
In 1998, the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) was statutorily authorized as a joint partnership between the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest
Service. The program provides leadership to the wildland fire science community by identifying high-priority fire science research needs that will enhance the decisionmaking ability of
managers to meet their objectives. This publication celebrates and describes the JFSP’s contributions to and impact on the wildland fire community over the past 20 years.
FireWorks is an educational program about the science of wildland fire, designed for students in grades K-12. Educator workshops are offered each year to teach educators, community leaders, and agency communicators how to use FireWorks. Two research projects have shown that FireWorks increases student and adult understanding of wildland fire.
FireWorks provides students with interactive, hands-on materials to study wildland fire. It is highly interdisciplinary and students learn about properties of matter, chemical and physical processes, ecosystem fluctuations and cycles, habitat and survival, and human interactions with ecosystems. Students using FireWorks ask questions, gather information, analyze and interpret it, and communicate their discoveries.