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Presentation Slides

This SERDP and ESTCP webinar focuses on DoD-funded research efforts on the use of prescribed fires to support ecological objectives in an effective, efficient, and safe manner on DoD lands. Specifically, investigators will discuss a suite of advancements that can help the planning and design of prescribed fires, and the use of an innovative fuel mapping tool (FuelsCraft) to aid with fuel characterization, fire behavior predictions, and post-fire monitoring.

Abstracts

“Characterizing Multiscale Feedbacks Between Forest Structure, Fire Behavior and Effects: Integrating Measurements and Mechanistic Modeling for Improved Understanding of Pattern and Process” by Dr. Chad Hoffman (RC19-1119)

The goal of this project is to increase managers’ ability to utilize prescribed fire operations to meet ecological objectives in an effective, efficient, and safe manner on Department of Defense (DoD) lands. The DoD recognizes that fire is an inherent part of DoD landscapes, and the use of prescribed fire is critical to sustaining the testing and training mission of many installations, reducing fire hazard, and supporting conservation and endangered species management. Despite extensive application, the design and planning of prescribed fires commonly rely on knowledge, tools, and technologies that do not effectively capture the spatial and temporal variability and interactions driving the behavior and effects obtained during a burn operation. As part of this research, we used an integrated measurement and modeling approach to develop new understanding of fine scale fire and fuel dynamics and to advance spatially explicit tools to aid with fuel characterization, fire behavior predictions, and post-fire monitoring. This presentation will describe a suite of advancements that can help the planning and design of prescribed fires.

“FuelsCraft: An Innovative Wildland Fuel Mapping Tool for Prescribed Fire Decision Support on Department of Defense Military Installations” by Dr. Susan Prichard (RC23-779)

The objective of the 3D Fuels project was to characterize wildland fuels that are common to DoD prescribed burn programs to inform physics-based models of fire behavior and smoke. To date, much of the emphasis on 3D fuel characterization has been on improved mapping of forest canopies, but understory and surface fuels are important drivers of fire behavior and smoke production. We constructed a fully documented and hierarchically scaled dataset of forest overstory and understory fuels for use in future fuel mapping, classification, fire behavior and smoke modeling applications. Across 17 sites, hierarchically scaled datasets include field-based measures of understory fuels coordinated with remotely sensed datasets containing airborne and terrestrial lidar and structure-from-motion photogrammetry. Modeled relationships between point cloud metrics and fuel bulk density inform unit-scale maps for prescribed burn programs that assign bulk density and other fuel properties as 3D inputs to computational fluid dynamics models of fire behavior and effects. The 3D fuels repository offers scaled datasets for machine learning and application for synthetic fuelbed development, computational fluid dynamics models of fire behavior, and prescribed fire decision support on U.S. military installations.

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Chad Hoffman is a professor of wildland fire science in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship and director of the Western Fire Research Center at Colorado State University. He also serves as the acting wildland fire program manager for the United States Geological Survey. His research program integrates various scientific approaches to develop new theories, methods, and tools that not only advance our understanding of fire and fuel dynamics, but that also assist in land management decision-making. He has directed funded research projects focusing on forest restoration and fuel treatment design and effectiveness, impacts of forest disturbance on wildland fuels and fire behavior, wildland fuel complex characterization, modeling and mapping and the development and testing of next generation fire behavior models. Dr. Hoffman received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in forestry from Northern Arizona University and a doctoral in natural resources from the University of Idaho.

Dr. Susan Prichard has worked as a fire ecologist and research scientist for the past 20 years at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Her main research interests focus on the effects of fire and other disturbances on forest dynamics, climate change on forest ecosystems, and fuel treatment options to mitigate fire severity and smoke impacts in fire-prone forests. She lives full-time in the Methow Valley near Winthrop, Washington. Having lived through record-setting wildfire seasons, she is focused on applied research questions that help to inform adaptive management under climate change conditions. Dr. Prichard received her bachelor’s degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in ecosystem science from the University of Washington in Seattle.