Managing fire on populated forest landscapes

Objectives

The proposed workshop will target three main areas: modelling wildfire impacts, fire management and the effects of climate change. The timeliness of the workshop should be clear, since there is some urgency to the need to improve the modelling and management tools required to mitigate wildfire risk to populated areas.

Wildfire Impacts: Sophisticated fire occurrence modelling beyond simple log-odds of presence-absence modelling is required. Spatially and temporally explicit methods that map the risk of counts, of large fires, of spread events and local clusters of fires, and the potential for a suppressed fire to escape initial attack are needed. Smoke transport models at fine local scales and coarser broader scales need to be developed using data obtained from remote satellite images. Questions to be addressed include: How can such models assist operational decisions, and how can climate change be incorporated by quantifying historical trends and by exploring the potential implications of future climate scenarios?

Dealing with Climate Change: The statistical analysis of historical climate change signals is ongoing. What trends are evident in these data sets? Is the fire season getting longer? Are we seeing more extreme events or shifts? How can we forecast climate impacts on climate change scenarios and quantify the uncertainty of any such point estimate? What effects does topography have on fire weather, and can current interpolation methods for fire weather data be improved upon? How can these methods be applied to better inform fire and forest management planning operations?

In order to maximize the benefit of the workshop, they will host several research webinars in advance of the meeting at BIRS. Those webinars will allow the questions and problems in these areas to be posed, data to be shared, and for researchers to begin investigating mathematical and statistical solutions to problems in fire management science. The workshop will then serve as a forum for a series of in-person meetings to focus concerted efforts on making further headway on these projects, and engage the participants in working sessions with tangible outputs.