Smoke from wildfires is a well-recognized public health and safety issue. While there have been extensive efforts to help communities be “smoke ready”, most people would still prefer not to live with weeks of unhealthy air quality during the summer and fall. This webinar will address what could be done to reduce the amount of smoke experienced by frequently impacted communities during wildfire season. By knowing the frequent pathways that air moves into these communities during wildfire season, we gain some insights as to where fuel treatments can have a greater probability of reducing smoke from subsequent wildfires. Rather than using wind roses, meteorological modeling and GIS processing techniques provide raster images of these pathways for each community. A case study illustrates that these strategic fuel treatments can reduce smoke by 40 percent from subsequent wildfires. The webinar will also cover how raster images and fuel reduction strategies can be integrated into planning and implementation strategies including regional wildfire crisis strategies, forest restoration plans, and community wildfire protection plans. Additionally, the frequent air pathways can be used during wildfire season for decision support to reduce smoke impacts to the public. Presenter: Rick Graw, USDA Forest Service

Rapid advancements in wildland fire modeling are promoting innovations in how we characterize and map wildland fuels. Before these models can be widely used, more research on fuel characterization and mapping methods is needed to support3D model inputs. The 3D Fuels Project is characterizing surface and canopy fuels on pine-dominated sites in the southeastern and western United States and western grasslands that represent fuels commonly characterized for prescribed burning. Through this project, researchers are developing a library of tools and datasets to leverage multi-scale estimates of 3D fuel structure and consumption that can be used directly within models of fire behavior and smoke production.

The idea of using sensors to remotely measure things is not new. Aerial photos taken from hot air balloons were first proposed as a tool for mapping streets in the 1850s. In1941, a US Forest Service ranger developed a technique for mapping fuels with aeria lphotos. Recent advances in remote sensing have dramatically increased the amount of spatial information that can be generated for a given area. This webinar will look at some of the ways the Fire and Environmental Research Applications Team at the Seattle FireLab is using remote sensing to measure fuels and fire behavior. We’ll also discuss howthis information can improve our capacity to model fires.

Researchers from Colorado State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Georgia are conducting a five-year study to understand how efforts that began as part of the US Forest Service Shared Stewardship Strategy develop over time, based on interviews with federal and state agency leadership, land managers, and other partners and stakeholders. 

Presenters: Courtney Schultz, Colorado State University Chad Kooistra, Colorado State University Heidi Huber-Stearns, University of Oregon Jesse Abrams, University of Georgia

In this work, we present a regional screening of Oregon and Washington communities to map wildfire evacuation vulnerability, assessed as the combination of wildfire hazard(burn probability and fire line intensity) and road network quality (assessed by simple geographic summaries of the paved road networks surrounding each town). Many places with relatively constrained road networks also coincide with high wildfire hazard. We hope that through this work, we can identify general geographic characteristics of communities that indicate greater wildfire evacuation vulnerability and help identify places that would benefit from more detailed analysis to aid in emergency response and preparedness. Alex Dye is a research associate at Oregon State University's College of Forestry, where he studies wildfire risk and climate change in the Western United States

Led by Susan Pritchard, Nick Povak, and Rebecca Lemons. 

This webinar offers an overview of overview of research to better understand drivers of fire severity, whats leading to really large wildfire events, and what these fires are leaving us to manage in the future. 

This webinar presents findings on factors that facilitate or frustrate cross-boundary wildfire risk management. 

This webinar describes the development of a Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) for Oregon and its incorporation into the Wildfire Risk Explorer tool mandated through State Senate Bill 762. We present an overview of social vulnerability and how it is measured, along with information on reliability, strengths, and limitations of SV indices and maps. We also walk through the SVI tool within the Oregon Wildfire Risk Explorer and provide time for questions and answers. Oregon Wildfire Risk Explorer: https://tools.oregonexplorer.info/OE_... OSU Scholars Archive record that includes county subdivision & tract level data: https://doi.org/10.7267/z890s265n Inquiries regarding the OSU wildfire risk maps should be directed to osuwildfirerisk@oregonstate.edu.

This webinar presented a preliminary overview of information collected from a recent survey of family forest owners in western Oregon and Washington. Presenters gave an overview of the larger project, presented results, and asked attendees about the data that was most interesting to them, as well as what other questions they had as the analysis phase for the data begins. Throughout the webinar attendees were welcomed to add insights and questions to a Jamboard session. The Jamboard for the webinar is available here: https://jamboard.google.com/d/1reS3q6...

In this webinar Francisco Escobedo of the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station summarizes a recent literature review of studies that focus on the environmental justice aspects of wildfire. He then presents preliminary findings on how different socio-demographic groups have been affected by wildfires across California in the last decade.