Abstracts and Presenter Biographical Information Oral Presentations
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ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ORAL PRESENTATIONS Abstracts for oral presentations and biographical information for presenters are listed alphabetically below by presenting author’s last name. Abstracts and biographical information appear unmodified, as submitted by the corresponding authors. Day, time, and room number of presentation are also provided. Abatzoglou, John John Abatzoglou, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Idaho. Research interests span the weather-climate continuum and both basic and applied scientific questions on past, present and future climate dynamics as well as their influence on wildfire, ecology and agriculture and is a key player in the development of integrated climate scenarios for the Pacific Northwest, US. Oral presentation, Wednesday, 2:30 PM, B114 Will climate change increase the occurrence of megafires in the western United States? The largest wildfires in the western United States account for a substantial portion of annual area burned and are associated with numerous direct and indirect geophysical impacts in addition to commandeering suppression resources and national attention. While substantial prior work has been devoted to understand the influence of climate, and weather on annual area burned, there has been limited effort to identify factors that enable and drive the very largest wildfires, or megafires. We hypothesize that antecedent climate and shorter-term biophysically relevant meteorological variables play an essen- tial role in favoring or deterring historical megafire occurrence identified using the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Atlas from 1984-2010. Antecedent climatic factors such as drought and winter and spring temperature were found to vary markedly across geographic areas, whereas regional commonality of prolonged extremely low fuel moisture and high fire danger prior to and immediately following megafire discovery. The results also illustrate that biophysical metrics provide a more direct link to proxies for fuel flammability and fire-behavior than individual meteorological variables and provide a potential means to narrow the gap between statistical and processed-based fire models. An initial qualitative assessment of how these results factored into megafires in fire season 2012 is provided. Finally, both a qualitative and statistical modeling approach using our findings is applied to climate scenarios generated from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercom- parison Project to assess regional changes in megafire frequency under anthropogenic climate change experiments. Adams, Theodore Theodore Adams is a graduate research assistant NCFLA, University of Montana and lead forestry technician at the Payette National Forest. Oral presentation, Thursday, 2:30 PM, C126 Balancing the benefits of advanced education with the continuance of a career in wildland fire While pursuing a career in the federal wildland firefighting service, many individuals make the decision to pursue post- baccalaureate education beyond what is often required for most operational and managerial fire positions. How these individuals balance the requirements of graduated education and fire career advancement is an intriguing question. The perspectives of select individuals who successfully navigated these divergent paths is presented here. Identifying the intentions, motivations, and thoughts of career wildland firefighters who choose to subject themselves to academic rigor while simultaneously pursuing professional opportunities in the field may help to guide other like-minded individuals throughout the fire community. Recruiting and enabling these highly skilled, motivated, and educated individuals can bridge the gap between practitioners and researchers by having several intermediaries that can speak the language of re- search, education, and management. Ager, Alan Alan Ager is an Opeations Research Analyst at the Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center and stud- ies the application of risk science and landscape modeling to address wildfire management issues within the USDA Forest Service Oral presentation, Tuesday, 2:30 PM, B116 Spatial prioritization of restoration and fuel management in fire adapted forest ecosystems Forest restoration activities on national forests in the US cover about 1.5 million ha annually and include thinning, masti- cation of surface fuel, and underburning. The long-term goal of this program is to restore ecological resiliency on expan- sive areas of fire prone forest ecosystems. The current prioritization of restoration projects often lack consideration of the spatial arrangement of treatments, and a framework for sensitivity analyses to understand how specific fuel management strategies affect long-term restoration goals. We developed and tested a spatial model for prioritizing forest restoration projects based on the concept of “low intensity fire containers.” The model builds contiguous project areas within which fire behavior is restored with treatments where needed, and locates the optimal project where stated restoration objectives are maximized. We tested the model on a 245,000 ha forest landscape and conducted a sensitivity analysis to understand tradeoffs between alternative treatment strategies. The model located optimal projects for restoration and identified treat- ment areas within them, although the location was dependent on the treatment density and total treatment area associated with a particular scenario. We found that a high density of treatments (>80% of the project) under a fixed level of treat- ment area allowance resulted in relatively small projects, thereby leaving the larger landscape at risk for fire. Conversely, low density treatment scenarios created larger projects, but ecologically important old growth forests were left susceptible to wildfire mortality. Intermediate treatment densities (35%) were optimal in terms of the overall reduction in the poten- tial wildfire mortality of old growth. The approach contrasts previous work on spatial optimization in fuel management where fire spread is blocked with strategic fuel breaks. The work expands the application in spatial optimization to the problem of dry forest restoration, and defines spatial planning goals for restoration programs. Ager, Alan (See biographical information, above.) Oral presentation, Wednesday, 2:05 PM, B113 Integrating wildfire into the Envision agent-based landscape model Projecting the future effects of climate change on coupled natural/human systems has become increasingly important in a wide array of land use planning and policy contexts. We are using the agent based model Envision to examine coupled effects of wildfire, climatic and land use changes in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley Ecoregion (WVE). Individual decision makers (actors) within Envision respond to a suite of factors including climate, land use regulation and incen- tives, land markets, fire hazard, land management costs and aesthetics. Agent behaviors were parameterized probabilisti- cally based on a survey of study area landowners as well as census and other local data. We are testing three hypotheses: 1) climate change will lead to altered fuel loads and greater wildfire hazard in the WVE; 2) current WVE land use trajectories will lead to increased wildland-urban interface area and changes in vegetation that together increase the risk of wildfire and loss of imperiled ecosystems; and 3) some policy sets will be more robust than others in managing fire risk and sustaining imperiled ecosystems across a range of future climate scenarios. Integrating wildfire within Envision was particularly challenging given the complexity of the agent-based modeling environment, and uncertainty associated with wildfire in a changing climate change. We built a fire modeling application within Envision using the minimum travel time fire spread algorithm in FlamMap. Each time step (e.g. 1 year) the application interface obtains the current state of the landscape from Envision in terms of vegetation and fuels and then reads a list of fires and associated simulation parameters from a stand- alone fire generator. The latter predicts fire probability and size using relationships between daily energy release compo- nent and fire history. The mechanics of the simulation system will be described along with example simulation outputs. Ager, Alan (See biographical information, above.) Oral presentation, Tuesday, 11:25 AM, C121 Leveraging wildfire risk assessments for fuel management planning The need to justify fuel management expenditures and document progress towards wildfire risk reduction continues to grow as federal land management agencies face reduced budgets and a growing wildfire problem. Oversight agencies have called for risk-based allocation of fuel management investments, and for monitoring wildfire risk over time. While there are many advances in the application of risk science to fuel management problems, a clear path to achieve long manage- ment goals remains unclear. At the core of the problem is the lack of a comprehensive risk assessment that establishes a benchmark of current risk from which to measure the impacts of fuel management programs. A related problem is that prioritization of fuel management activities lack consistent risk based methods at the various scales at which funding deci- sions are made. This presentation will discuss how information from risk assessments can be used to inform specific fuel management planning activities, and potentially