ESTCP is soliciting proposals on advanced modeling tools that enhance the Department of War’s (DoW’s) ability to model prescribed fire, fuels management effectiveness, and wildland urban interface risks on military lands. The execution and effectiveness of many DoW prescribed fire and wildfire mitigation efforts is determined by the multi-scale feedbacks between fire and atmosphere that govern fire activity and fire’s response to vegetation structure, topography, and the complexity of wildland urban interface environments.  

A growing number of models or methodologies have demonstrated promise towards representing these critical fire-atmospheric feedbacks, but historical funding patterns and inertia among modeling teams has led to silos of innovation and uneven advances as computational resources grow in abundance. The objective of this Topic Area is to demonstrate and validate the potential advances and utility of recombining or transforming existing atmosphere, fire process, or combustion models. Such advances could include capturing a broader range of fire regimes, expanding applicable scale range for a given tool, or achieving significantly faster simulation speeds optimized for cloud computing, without sacrificing model accuracy.

Proposed technologies should address one or more of the following needs:

• Combine and evaluate new combinations of atmospheric large-eddy simulations (LES) models with improved combustion or fire process models for designing, planning, or executing prescribed fires as well as evaluating fuel management activities on wildland fire or Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fire risks.
• Demonstrate how recombination of models or transformed model formulations can increase model capability, scale range, or simulation speed, while not degrading results and skill compared with original tools.

Successful proposals are expected to: 

• Demonstrate skill of emerging models against existing pseudo-canonical fire examples, observed fire behavior data, published model results, or practitioner expectations of fire activity response to fire configuration or local fire environment characteristics (including prescribed fire, vegetative structure changes, and discontinuities in wildland fuels).
• Projects should execute rapid test and evaluation plans in a 12 to 18-month time frame and should consider the following information for specific sections of the proposal.
  • In the Technical Approach section, provide a detailed description of the technical approach, including the availability of data to determine tool, strategy, or technology performance. Proposers should clearly state expected deliverables and provide sufficient detail so that the technical approach can be clearly understood by reviewers. Proposals must indicate the technology readiness level (TRL) of their proposed effort at project initiation and expected TRL at project completion.
  • In the Expected Benefits section, a qualitative and semi-quantitative description of the expected benefit to DoW and broader impacts of a successful project should be included.
  • The Technology Transition section should discuss activities, including the key elements of science and technology translation that will be needed to engage with key stakeholders and translate this technology into operations. This section should be detailed, accounting for the inherent need to communicate to, translate to, and gather information from the end-user community of installation planners, engineers, and natural resource managers. 

The expected benefit of the proposed work is to demonstrate and validate coupled fire-atmospheric and combustion models in support of managing wildfires, WUI fires, fuel treatments, and prescribed fires. The knowledge derived from this research will ultimately be used to manage wildland fires on or adjacent to DoW landscapes to maintain military readiness and meet the military mission (https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/emr/epc/wild-fire-prog.html).

The DoW performs >750,000 acres of prescribed burns annually on DoW lands to decrease the risk of wildfire, support ecosystem resilience, and sustain training operations. Prescribed fire can be used to increase resilience of critical infrastructure and surrounding lands and increase access to training lands for executing on the mission sets within the Department. Protecting our Service men and women against the dangers of fighting unpredictable wildfires is of utmost priority and can be achieved through improvements to prescribed fire modeling and comparing existing wildfire modeling systems. Natural hazards and changing weather conditions increase the risk of wildfire, especially in the WUI, particularly on DoW lands (including training bases, research installations, and critical infrastructure). DoW land managers need improved information and modeling tools that support the analysis of wildfire risk and planning prescribed fire efforts. This investment will ultimately strengthen mission-critical infrastructure and limit degradation of operations and avoid restrictions or loss of testing and training lands due to regulations and/or degraded conditions. 

Submissions should be full proposals only (no pre-proposal stage), with a maximum of 10 pages. No selection briefings will be required from Principal Investigators. The period of performance for proposals should not exceed 18 months to accommodate the requirement for rapid execution of testing and evaluation plans.