 Good morning or afternoon for those of the east and welcome. Thanks a lot for joining us today My name is Jeff Rubin, and I'm the emergency manager for 12 Valley fire and rescue Oregon's largest fire district I'm also a member of the National Academies Board on Earth Sciences and Resources In this larger capacity that I'll be your moderator for the presentation by Dr. Jennifer Walsh We bring fire with us the role of people in changing modern US fire regimes I'll offer some background of the webinar series and review the logistics for today's webinar before introducing Jennifer And turn the microphone over to her Members and staff of the Academies Board on Earth Sciences and Resources a KAB sir and the water science and technology board Which has no acronym are collaborating on this new webinar series that will explore issues across the earth and water interface We touching on topics that have a strong basis in science and engineering and how that knowledge and information Can impact decision-making and ideally lead to improved outcomes for individual communities and the nation The series will build on a set of webinars that these are hosted over the past roughly three years All which are archived on the Academies website, which we'll share at the end of the session We'd be interested in hearing Course or more urge you to Comment option in the zoom platform before the end of the webinar This webinar is being recorded posting should be in roughly seven to ten days registrants will receive enough Which if you're not receiving updates and would like to we'll let you know how to sign up at the end of the webinar So for some technical details dr. Baloch will speak Forty minutes after which we'll engage her with your questions and comments until the close of the hour Ask the question. Please use the question and answer box You can locate this by hovering your mouse near the bottom of your screen where you should see a button that goes Q&A Please submit questions there and not in the chat feature I'll be tracking those questions as they're entered in We probably won't be able to get to all of them. We'll do our best and I'll try to select a representative sample Having technical issues, please you keep any feature or the chat feature or you can So on to the main event I am pleased to introduce dr. Jennifer Balsch She is the rector of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder Jennifer's research aims to understand the patterns and processes that underlie disturbance and ecosystem recovery Check really how people are shifting fire regimes and related consequences. She's conducted fire ecology for and lit a few experimental burdens to understand the consequences of altered fire regimes dr. Baloch great, thank you so much Jeff for that nice introduction and To national academies for this opportunity to speak with you all today. So thank you for joining us I'm going to be speaking about how we bring fire with us and a very long complex relationship that people have with fire Right now there are 81 fire wildfires burning across the u.s. I'm totaling about 900,000 acres this year we've seen about 7.3 million acres burn and last year at this time we saw about 8.5 And we keep breaking records. So last year we saw california's largest wildfire in recorded history with the thomas fire And we've seen that break through this year With the mendocino complex coming in and just just barely contained at 459,000 acres. So we're Struggling with what we term the fire problem, but I I argue that it's really part of a long history that people have with fire and changing the fire environment so just to reiterate the options for asking questions if you look at This panel in your screen. There is a q&a box Which allows you to to put a set of questions in the queue So please use that and here's some contact information for myself And other folks who have helped organize this session today at lesbethide and ramy chapetta Both of the national academies So please if you have questions put them in that q&a box Okay, so I argue that humans are the fire species That one of the key things that defines us is our ability to manipulate fire And in fact, I would challenge each and every one of you to think about whether you could live without fire for a day We use it to cook our food. We use it to heat our homes and ultimately we use it Um to fuel our transportation industry and our economy in fact is dependent on combustion And we kind of forget this fact that we have a really Intimately Derived connection to fire And I think our current fire situation and the challenges that we face Are directly connected to the human relationship with fire and there are three key ingredients That fire needs one is hot and dry conditions The second is fuels to carry those those ignitions and then The last is ignitions. I'm sorry. I messed that up, but um hot dry conditions fuels to carry a fire and a spark And ultimately people are changing all three of those things and in fact Our relationship with fire goes back over a million years. Some of our early hominid Ancestors are documented to have used fire. Um, we've been managing landscapes for tens of thousands of years And fast forward to today Where fire is still present in our landscapes and we play a huge role in shaping that fire environment So the fire science community has known That there is a direct link between a warming climate and fire activity this is a A figure showing the amount of burned area or the number of fires over 400 hectares so large fires Across the western u.s. Going back to the 1970s and the red bars And the black line is showing temperature anomalies. And so we we know that The increase in fire activity that we've seen Since the 1970s and 1980s is directly linked to a two degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature across the western u.s Which has also led to earlier snowpack melt Leaving longer fire seasons And a fire season that's months longer than it used to be in fact firefighters Talk about how they're on all the time and then it's really a year-long fire season now compared to even just a couple decades ago So this relationship has been well documented For over a decade this link between a warming climate and increased fire and just recently Me and my group updated this with information about fire that happened in just the last couple of years including 2017 Which was the second largest in terms of area burned and the most costly fire season that we've seen It it cost us about 18 billion dollars in damages Plus an additional three billion in suppression costs we spent Many hundreds of millions of dollars just suppressing single fire events The soberanes fire in california a couple years ago. We spent 259 million dollars Suppressing that single fire event. And so the question is, you know, how are we going to handle this problem? This situation where we're seeing increased fire activity And the suppression costs and the damages associated with those are very very substantial So this is showing you an image of the burned area in 2017 And then the bottom panel is showing an updated trend line associated with the amount of burned area by wildfire as measured by modus and The mtbs record, which is based on landsat. So two different satellite products going back to the mid 1980s And one key thing here is that across the western u.s across all of our ecoregions We've seen a 350 percent increase since 1980s And in forest systems We've seen a much higher rate of increase about 1500 percent. So 15 times more fire We're seeing today and then we did in the 1980s And this is particularly important in the context of large fires. We're seeing five times more large fires today than we did in the 1970s And it's also important to acknowledge that there is underlying natural variability And it's not just what people are doing, but we have a complex relationship between Ignitions fuels and climate And so what also happened in last year's fire season is we had what I call a pylon of extreme events So we had a really wet Winter We had a really hot Summer and then we had a really dry fall. In fact, it was the wettest. So the darker blue aqua color is indicating the wettest areas over a winter season The dark reds are showing the hottest temperatures ever recorded and the Browns in the right hand panel are showing The driest conditions ever recorded and so we had The wettest the hottest and the driest in large portions of the western u.s last year That was not linked to climate change was part of natural variability, but these types of oscillations Are predicted in the future under future climate change scenarios. So it gives us a a bit of a foreshadowing of the kinds of climatic events we may see in the future that are directly linked to increasing fire activity because That wet season promoted fine fuel growth and grasses that then dried out In the following summer and then late onset of rain Was convergent with high wind conditions Particularly in southern california, which led to the thomas fire So it's important to think about natural variability, but we're also Struggling with how do we how do we deal with the extremes that we're seeing? And how does that relate to fire activity? So the first ingredient that we need for fire is warm and dry conditions And we not only know that there's a link between a warming world and increased fire, but we can actually parse out The portion that's related to our contribution to climate warming. So anthropogenic climate change has dried our fuels And effectively doubled the amount of western forests that have burned since 1984. So we can pinpoint That drying of fuels that's related to climate warming And actually measure how much more forests are burning as a consequence of that And that comes from some work by some colleagues down in bosco and park williams who looked at eight different metrics of fuel aridity All you need to know from this complicated figure is that no matter what fuel aridity metric you use Whether it's the palmar drought severity index, whether it's vapor pressure deficit All of them are indicating A delta shift so an increase in fuel aridity associated with anthropogenic climate change over the past 15 years and so What that's saying is our warming climate is drying our fuels which has huge consequences for for forest systems And when you plot that change that average change across all of those eight metrics So the bottom axis here is showing the average fuel aridity change over this time period And plot that against the amount of area that's burned What you're seeing is a substantial difference between the amount of forest area that was burning in the 1980s and 1990s compared to the 2000s And the 2000s are represented by the red dots in the 1980s and 1990s are represented by the blue dots And so there's a substantial shift in the amount of area that's burning as a consequence Of drier fuels and what's really critical here is that there's a non-linear relationship There is with just a small amount of drying We can see a very large increase in burned area and that's a really important A really important result of this work is that we can Expect larger fires and much larger fires with just a little bit more drying So the second ingredient that's needed for fuels for fire is fuels and people have changed fuels through our Different land use and management practices and we have also introduced invasive species in large portions of the us Um, one example is cheap grass, which is an an invasive non native grass that covers about 40,000 Square kilometers in the great basin. It's indicated in the left hand panel in red Compared to native ecosystems like sagebrush or montain shrublands pinion juniper salt desert shrubs And it's it's a vexing species in terms of trying to mitigate it and get rid of it Because it is so tightly connected to fire And what it does is it it creates a continuous carpet of fuels in between native sagebrush in particular And it's highly flammable and in fact it dries out before any other native species and the the panel in the middle is the burned area product from modus and Some of my research matched those two to look at the distribution of cheap grass and The extent of burned area over the 2000s to see how much cheap grass is burning compared to native Species and it turns out that it's it's burning twice as much It's burning twice as much as native vegetation types And so that's another huge shift in the fire environment. That's related to How people are introducing invasive plants And it's not just Invasive plants, but we're also changing fuels in other ways too by fragmentation of landscapes by introducing agriculture into areas So we're effectively changing fuels on very large scales Just to give you an example of some of the consequences. So this is from A progression map of the martin fire which happened this past summer Um, I call it one of the largest fires you've never heard of because it happened in Northern Nevada where there aren't a lot of people And not a lot of uh structures threatened But this fire burned 435 thousand acres in the span of a few days And it's this is cheap grass This is cheap grass territory. Um, a lot of this was fueled by extensive cheap grass invasion And um, it started on July 5th at 1 o'clock in the morning I think the cause is still to be determined, but it happened to coincide with Probably early morning celebrations related to independent state and I'll get back to that in a second, but What's important here is that this fire is the 11th largest fire that's been recorded in the determinist us And so we're hitting These several hundred thousand acre marks for large fire events year after year And spatially what this looks like on the ground Is cheap grass is kind of this light tan colored grass in the picture on the left and it As I said literally creates a continuous carpet of fuels Um that are very flammable. They dry out sooner than other native vegetation types And they burn really really quickly And readily So the third ingredient That's important for fire is ignitions And my own work has shown that over the last couple of decades We have started over 84 percent of our nation's wildfires. So we are Redistributing ignitions and changing the density of ignitions across the entire u.s and that That information comes from a paper that was published last year Where we looked at a million and a half government records of wildfires Which contained information on cause Either lightning, which is the natural source or human causes and then A bunch of information on the different types of human causes But if you look at the temporal distribution of human started fires We are also tripling the length of the fire season by by providing ignitions essentially throughout the year I'm in the area that's dominated By human started wildfires is seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires And we're responsible for nearly half of all the area that burns across the u.s from a from 1992 to 2012 And then we can break these causes down and look at okay out of that 84 percent What what's the relationship with specific types of causes and the majority is related to burning of trash and debris There's a huge category of unknown human causes. There's a large portion of portion of arson started fires equipment use campfires Children playing with fire smokers. So those are the big causes Compared to the natural started lightning strikes And the spatial distribution of human started wildfires looks like this. So this is an image showing those million and a half Government records of wildfires. So these are all fires that require some sort of suppression response. That's important These are not intentional agricultural burns That don't get out of control. These are fires that get out of control and are requiring some sort of suppression response And this is showing the percent of human ignitions So the red are the colors the more human ignitions and the blue are the more Lightning started fires and then the size of the dot relates to the number of fires So you're seeing some pretty stark spatial distribution Information about where humans are are causing the most Human ignitions. You've got strong patterns for human started fires in the southeast And also on the coastal regions, particularly in california, or again, washington, and then lighting fires not surprisingly are Dominant in the intermountain regions And in fact, they're almost a relic that Is determined by the fact that lightning is still the predominant source of ignitions in those locations And we can look at why this might be Not only Why people are starting lots of fires, but also what the what the patterns are in natural lightning ignitions And some other work that we did Looked at the density of lightning So looking at high resolution Lightning strike information On the left hand side, you're seeing the the um density of Lightning occur Which you've got monsoonal patterns showing up in the In the southwest And then the right hand panel is showing What percentage of those lightning strikes are actually Showing up without any rain. So they're dry lightning strikes So there's quite a difference in terms of the amount of lightning that's happening And then what percentage of that is actually likely to start A wildfire It looks like california west of the syria's doesn't have any data But what that's actually showing is that the lightning climatology doesn't exist So there is not a lot of natural lightning strikes that occur West of the mountainous regions Along the coast and what that does is that opens up the door for people to provide the ignitions that start most of the wildfires In california and coastal Oregon and washington And the seasonal distribution of wildfire On the left hand side, you're seeing the seasonal distribution of wildfire associated with human started fires And on the right hand panel, you're seeing the seasonal distribution Based on lightning started fires and not surprisingly you've got a very strong Year-long distribution across the us with dominance in the In the spring in the eastern part of the us and dominance in the summer and fall In the western us with also some late fall early winter burning happening in texas and the In the southern part of the country And we can also look at this in terms of the day of the year So then this is a plot showing the number of fires that occurred on any given day Across this two decade period of time Red is human and blue is lightning And it's too bad there's not audience participation because i'd ask you all what that day is in the middle There are the the peak and you probably know It just takes you a second to realize that that is july 4th So july 4th is the single day of the year when we have the most number Of wildfires period And they are predominantly human started Um 7 000 wildfire events occurred On july 4th that were started by people across this two decade period And it's too bad that our independence day didn't coincide with a winter A winter day to avoid that particular particular problematic day And what you're also seeing is a large um pulse of spring burning in the east which dominates that early part of the of the season Um and then lightning has a very strong summer seasonality to it and in fact It's worth mentioning that we are at the tail end of the distribution right now of the lightning season signal But our fire season isn't over yet, right? So we still have a couple months where we need to be concerned about wildfires But now we're moving into the period of the year when most of those ignitions Based on probabilities and and past experience are likely to be started by people You can also break this out by ecoregion and look at The differences across different ecoregions in the us So this is ordered based on Decreasing human influence so that the greatest amount of human influence is in mediterranean california Where you see virtually no lightning strikes and and a predominant signal Of human started fires To the north american deserts and temperate seras um and also northwest forested mountains which have a huge lightning signal Where lightning is still the predominant source of ignitions compared to humans and there are lots of really interesting spatial patterns in this data set from this FPA f o d database which is where the information comes from the government records which carry short the us Forest service pulled together. It's publicly available data But there's really interesting patterns. So again red is human started fires and blue is lightning You see road networks pop out such as in the the panel a You also see high density wildland urban interface interactions with panel b where those stars are representing Fort Collins boulder denver Um In colorado springs and so there's a huge influx of people Living in this landscape and also recreating in this landscape that are providing those ignition sources And then you also see very stark transitions around eco boundaries between forested areas and More agricultural areas where human started fires are constrained to the forest and regions in appalachia in panel c It's also important to note that because we are providing ignitions throughout the year We are also changing the conditions under which those fires are are burning indirectly. So we are Ultimately changing the moisture conditions because of the timing of our ignitions. And so this panel is showing kind of if you think of fire as an occupying a niche space The bottom the bottom line is thousand-hour fuel moisture. So moisture content and then The left hand side is lightning strikes per square kilometer per month And the density of fires increases with Going from yellow to red And most of the lightning cause fires not surprisingly are associated with high lightning strikes, but also very dry conditions around Between six to ten percent fuel moisture Whereas the human started fires are happening across an entire spectrum of fuel moisture conditions and up to 18 percent fuel moisture and so what that's saying is We are we are actually fundamentally changing also the fire behavior That's happening because of when we are providing those ignitions We can also split this out and see if the trends in large fires. So going back to that initial panel that I showed From westerling Which shows an increase in The number of fires and then I showed a panel showing the increase in burned area over time If we split this out by human started versus lightning started fires Do we see the same trends? And we we do see those trends, but there is one difference, which is that Lightning started fires are increasing more so than human started fires Related to this temporal trend And then we can also split that out based on season to see When during the year those trends are actually occurring. So for lightning The dominant signal is happening in the summertime, which is the middle panel the red color Compared to the spring and the fall, which is the green and the orange respectively And human caused fires are increasing both in the spring and in the summer. Um, and so that signal is happening Not just in the summer, but but also in the spring predominantly in the eastern us So what's the future of fire going to look like in the us? Is this a question of just more big and bad fires? Um, and I think a lot depends on us I think a lot of this question Is related to where I started which is we bring fire with us and we Consequently have the ability to to shape How fire plays out in the landscape and it's not like other hazards in the sense that We don't precipitate hurricanes Or typhoons, but we do play a fundamental role in when and where fires do happen And the fundamental question that I as a scientist am trying to answer is how is climate change going to interact with what people are doing So it's not just about climate changing our fire environment and it's also not just about people changing our fire environment It's about both and they're interacting and they're they're both shifting at the same time And so one of the challenges we have is to try and understand to how are those two Forces going to change In the future So going back to these two ingredients for fire In terms of ignitions and climate For the western us pan on the left shows the anthropogenic fires in black the black dots And then the red which are the lightning started fires and these are changing These sources of ignitions are changing particularly through the anthropogenic Through time and how do we understand that change in distribution is one key question And the second key question is what are what are our future climate projections going to tell us about the increase in in fire danger? So this is a projected Increase in short-term fire danger as a function of 13 different climate projections And it varies from 0% to 80% increase in short-term fire danger So as that's changing we also need to know how anthropogenic ignitions are going to be changing in the future And there are global models that look at changes in fire over time. So The these four different panels are showing Both the expected change Mean change between different climate model productions projections In the earlier part of the projection in the later part of the projection So panel a is between 2010 the 2039 and panel c is 2070 to 2099 And by 2100 we're seeing an increase particularly in the western us If you can kind of drill into that portion of panel c We are seeing an increase expected increase in fire activity compared to The central states And then the southeastern states are expecting some sort of decrease And these are coarse resolution model projections and The panels on the right show whether there's agreement Or disagreement among those projections And there's generally agreement about what's going to happen in the western us among these different model projections So we can use this information to help guide us But we also need to know what's going on with this Which is the 2010 wildland urban interface so the yellows and the reds Are the areas that indicate where we have people Intermixing with wildland areas and these are the homes that are really really vulnerable to fire risk and in fact 9% of the total land area of the us Is designated as wildland urban interface, but it's projected to double by 2030 And so this problem is not going to go away in terms of Putting homes literally in the line of fire and increasing the risk to to lives and property And in fact There are currently 1.8 million homes right now that are at high risk of wildfire Which is estimated to be valued at about 300 billion dollars So we already are living with substantial risk to 1.8 million homes But again, the question is how is this map going to change in the future in concert with future changes in climate and just to give you a sense of The number of structures that are at risk or that have burned as a consequence of wildfires. This is a roughly 12-year period Showing the spatial distribution of where structures have burned And where some of that risk is being experienced And if we look at the percentage of area that's burned in the wui So this is some work that tanya shonegel led that I participated in is what is What's the area that's burning that's actually in the wui and that's designated by the red And the orange is the wildfires that are happening outside the wui and so a substantial portion up to 30 percent Or over 30 percent in california is burning in the wui. Colorado is is second Um, so we have substantial amounts of area that are burning in the wui and that are essentially threatening people's hopes So what's the solution to this? How do we how do we coexist with fire? So two things I think are critically important one is building better And the second is burning better and what I mean by Building better is that there's lots of things that we can do To mitigate the risk of fire to people's homes In terms of burning better. What I mean is we can actually use fire to fight fire We can use prescribed controlled burns to actually mitigate the risk Of more intense future fires, but we have to be very intentional about how we do both of these things So some examples So headwaters economics has estimated how many communities are at risk And they estimate that four over 4 000 communities had a 100 plus acre fire Burned within 10 miles of town And so this highlights the need for communities to think about how they're going to be fire wise What are the things that they're going to do in terms of the the development patterns and the layout of communities And the materials that are used to build homes What are they going to do in order to to mitigate that risk and are they going to do any treatments in and around their communities We have incentives for mitigating the risk of floods Why don't we have the same for fire so going from this idea of flood plain maps to fire plain maps or fire escape maps We have information available to us that can help incentivize through insurance structures For floods, but why don't we have that for fire at a national scale? There's no equivalent to FEMA for fire but the panel on the right is showing The state of california's fire hazard severity zones and they are ahead of the game in terms of developing maps that indicate moderate high very high risk associated with fire that that could be used in shifting insurance incentives and Requiring homeowners to consider The risk of fire when they're purchasing their home and when they're when they're buying insurance to protect their home This is An image from sentinel, which is the european satellite of the thomas fire that happened last year in december of 2017 In venture county and the reason why I show this image is because there are over A dozen satellites right now that are capturing information about fire and fire effects both public satellites From nasa and the european space agency, but also the privately held data as well from digital globe or planet and This source of information really provides us the opportunity to develop something like This where we can develop a probability map of fire hazard across the u.s Even globally given the amount of information that's available from satellite and what we also need Are is more of the right kinds of fire so we We have to shift our cultural perceptions of fire in a way that that allows for For more prescribed burns. The southeast is really good at this They have a long history of implementing prescribed burns and this is a map of the states that are doing the most In terms of the dark brown colors But we have a hard time implementing prescribed burns In the western u.s. And there's lots of reasons why and very legitimate reasons It's hard to find the right climate conditions that are conducive for it. It's hard to get the smoke To disperse in a way that doesn't impact communities But it's it's not really a question of Of if a fire is going to happen It's a question of when and so this is one of the things that we can do to change The shape of fire and how fire plays out on our landscape is to actually implement more prescribed burns And this is a complicated set of maps showing different fires that happened One on top of each other In western australia. This is actually worked on by an anthropologist who worked with some Aboriginal communities to map Map the fires in and around their communities as opposed to further out and I want to highlight a couple things here In the bottom panel the black lines are kind of road and trail networks And the white dots are where communities are living And the biggest difference you're going to see is looking at Panel e and d on the far right hand side. So panel e is showing Layers of layers layers and layers of fires that that happened that were heavily managed And that were that were smaller in in size and one of the key elements here is that these aboriginal communities have been managing with fire for for millennia And part of their practice is the intentional use of fire to mitigate the risk of Large climate driven fires and so close to the community You're seeing what's going on in panel e and in panel d you're seeing what's happening further out where there's less management Happening and so this is what we are trying to implement or relearn From different communities around the world who have been practicing this for for long periods of time Trying to reinstate our practice of Patch burning to mitigate the risk of future intense fires And one thing we do a lot of too is we we treat fuels We have treated a lot of area In the western us in terms of fuel mitigation treatment and it's very expensive it costs millions and millions of dollars But the upshot is that not a lot of it actually sees a burn treatment and so We have to be very intentional about where we're putting fuel treatments Because it costs a lot of money to remove those fuels to masticate those fuels Um and in terms of community response people don't like to see cut down trees And so it's hard to implement them where people live, but that's the risk. That's probably the most important to mitigate for So the upshot of my talk and what i'm trying to get across today is that we we really do need to reframe fire We need to think about the realities of fire rather than the myths people play a fundamental role in changing fire through our changing of climate on a global scale Related to greenhouse gas emissions. We change fire related to the fuels that are there in the landscape and how those fuels are distributed And we also play a huge role in supplying and changing the ignitions that are available for fires And not all fire is bad fire does do good work Most of our ecosystems are have plants that are adapted to fire And so it's a question of how do we let fire do the good work when it's possible and when it's realistic And the last bit is that we can and we must live with fire. Um, we Live in flammable places. Um, and particularly in the west There's no getting around that we tried fire suppression for over 100 years And it didn't work And so now the question is how do we live with fire? And to create key things for that accomplishing that are building better and and burning better and so I am gonna Quickly go through this but I'm optimistic and one of the reasons why I'm optimistic is I think the fire science community has a lot to offer Particularly through the power of big fire data And I call this kind of a modern-day palm zest. Um, which Um is historically kind of a manuscript page from a scroll or a book from which that text has been scraped or washed off So it can be used again and I consider our landscapes kind of a palm zest. They reflect a memory Particularly with fire and fire history Um, and this is just to give you a sense of what fire looked like in the us in the 1880 census um It was actually the eastern us that was on fire related to huge changes in land use and fire was used as a tool In frontier expansion And so while we're dealing with a western us fire issue today just 200 years ago It was a very different picture which really marks The human relationship with fire And we have lots of novel sources of data. Um, there are Millions of incident command reports Government reports and also incident command reports related to some of the biggest And most challenging fires to fight and there's also new sources of data related to Drones to help firefighting communities, but also The science community get a better handle on fire behavior And we also have new sources of information in social media and and search engines This is showing a picture of the number of searches for wildfire in google in 2015 Which gives us a metric of impact and and how our communities and how people in society are responding to those events Just a few funding sources to acknowledge for this work nasa The joint fire science program and also the University of Colorado boulder's grand challenge effort which supports earth lab Which is a center that I direct data synthesis center At cu boulder trying to accelerate discovery particularly around topics like fire and fire science For helping society better manage and adapt. So thank you for listening And if you want to contact me, here's my email and here's earthlabs website And if you have any questions, this is the time when I'd like to invite you to Add your questions in the q&a box On the Toolbar at the bottom of your zoom screen So thank you all for for joining us today Well, thanks jennifer. We do have several questions coming in. Uh, did you want to raise the poll questions? Okay, so if I go to the first question there from william summers Given that all of your premises are correct, which I believe they are And the existential climate change and we drivers are in terms of fire manager interventions irreversible and predicted What is a fire manager to do? This is a great question and I think Some of the solutions are again in Building better and burning better and I think one thing that we critically need is a cultural shift from Um thinking about fire as an emergency to Thinking about it more proactively and and how can we implement more prescribed burns in the landscape to mitigate those risks? and I know that these are very tricky challenges for the fire management community and They're exhausted. Um by being on the back end of the emergency response with Fewer and fewer resources to fight more and more fires. So I I acknowledge that that's a very challenging problem But I I do have faith in human ingenuity and I think we can I think we can find a solution Um, we had some demographic poll questions. Did you want to raise those? Oh, that would be great. That would be great. Um So we had three polling questions. We we just wanted to get a sense of where people were coming from and What your background is And what you think the most important science questions are So if you wouldn't mind taking a minute telling us where you're joining us from That would be great And while folks are doing that I'll go on with another one. Um, how has the human relationship to lightning caused wildfires changed? So one thing that we're seeing is Um Oh, I'm sorry that the human relationship to lightning started fires So we um One thing that that is happening that we're seeing particularly in mountainous regions is that the human ignitions are starting to replace Um, the lightning started fires Um, and that's a consequence of almost getting there first before the lightning started fires Do and so you're seeing that replacement of lightning started fires, but Um, we also have a very long history with lightning started fires, particularly in regions. Um, like the um in by entire biomes like the tropical savanna, um, which have had huge numbers of lightning started fires for very long periods of time and um, and We in our early hominid ancestors evolved in the savanna landscape. And so we've we've had a long history with lightning started fires and part of our strategies and what you see in Indigenous communities around the world is this patch posei birding that's actually trying to mitigate the risk of those lightning started fires and uh You're uh, the map that's showing the percent of human ignitions closely replicates the us demographics map Or while under interface distributions with the exception of california recent large fires However, are not especially aligned with the red dots which you care to comment on that Yes, I'd have to take a closer um look at that but I think part of what's going on there is that um Where you do see Urban suburban areas you're actually seeing smaller wildfires occur in those locations obviously with the exception of some of the largest ones that we've seen in california, but Most of the wildfires that we're seeing in and around the wildland urban interface are actually on the smaller side and part of why that is is because Those fires are detected earlier Then the ones that are happening in more remote locations and they're also generally easier to access because of road distribution And resources to fight those fires versus remote very remote locations that um They can get very big um because they go undetected for a long period of time And then they also are very difficult to fight because they often don't have very easy access Alrighty a question on uh the distribution of cheat grass, uh, which you mentioned early in the presentation Uh, the question says there are other important, uh annual exotic grasses Uh, and many other listed plant communities have significant, uh, understory of cheat grass Uh, did you want to comment on that or uh, where the the nature of the the data and role of other species? um, yeah, so, um I just mentioned one, um, we're currently doing some work looking at other invasive plants In the role that they're playing and changing fire activity as well. So it's not just cheat grass. Absolutely And the data for that, um um So cheat grass is An interesting species and then it dries out before other native species and you can actually detect that via satellite and so we derived two different maps, um Based on satellite, um data showing that essentially early Early green up and and early senescence Which you can see that shift in color um in the satellite records So we derived our own maps using that that methodology We have, uh, a few questions on uh relating to structures and building better. So i'm gonna combine a few of them, but Um, the first one is more general. Uh, how does the presence of structures, uh, affect fire behavior in wooby? Yeah, so that's a that's a great question. There's a there's several different things. Um, so Just the presence of the road networks that, um That support those communities will change. Um Change the fire spread capability of of an individual fire, but also um It depends on what those homes are built out of and also the landscaping and the plants that are are planted around those homes. So Um plants vary in their flammability like juniverse, for example, are highly flammable Compared to more broadly forest species And so the plants that are used In and around homes are also will also change flammability and ignition likelihood palm trees Are known to start on fire and create kind of this Whirl of sparks that can Then transfer to other homes and and help the fire actually carry So those things matter and also the materials that homes are built out of If they're shingled roofs, um, obviously those are Extremely flammable compared to um metal roofs, which obviously don't burn And so that changes what what burns in the landscape And uh, while we before we go to the next question, uh, we'll bring up the the final poll question Which is uh more than demographics for our audience And while you're looking at that we'll continue with the build better principle a couple questions Um asking us a little bit more about build better Not just in terms of construction, but particularly any comments on Zoning or other land use policies New technologies, etc One mentioned statistic being cited that the 50 increase in home building in the wooey and intermountain region Yeah, so there's a lot of low hanging fruit. There's a lot of room to improve. Um, and so there's not there are not um Let me say it this way the the room for improved zoning and requirements for Buffers around buildings and the type of materials that are needed. There's a lot of room to To improve that situation Most of the firewise efforts have been um based on community-wide efforts that have been voluntary Where communities are really taking it upon themselves to Um to build better. Um, and so this is a huge area for um For us to rally around um and improve The likelihood that those homes won't burn When wildfires do come through Do you feel that the fire wise is an effective? program uh as is or i'm not sure what the data is on actual efficacy, but um Would you have thoughts on hey if fire wise could be x y z it might be even better? Yeah, I think the the state that we're in right now is we just need we need more and more communities to to adopt the basic principles within fire wise Um in order to understand what the efficacy is and unfortunately we're going to have to see as fires go through how ultimately Um that effort protects those communities, but we have good support that we think that that's going to work. Um and particularly Removing fuels around homes Creating a 50 meter buffer In and out access is also really important for firefighting communities And there's lots of things that we can that we can do better and even just more effectively using roads Around communities to protect them as fire breaks Is another thing that we can do too Thanks, so I can see the from the responses of the first couple polls we have a really good spread in terms of both geographic and discipline representation And you can see up there now Also spread across some of the most pressing fire science needs Um following up on fire wise since a lot of that is based on changing behavior And you certainly mentioned the need to change culture Uh, you have a sense of you know, how do we make that better or how do we better incorporate the sociological literature On wildfires. Can we better apply that than we are now or is it more a matter of generating additional information? Yeah, it's it's all of those things and I would I would make a plug for more social scientists um To enter this area of fire science too because I think um, we need more folks to be thinking about those problems from a social science perspective Rather than my perspective, which is a natural science one and and so um, the question of how do we get behavior to change or how do we culturally make those shifts um Is just as challenging as trying to understand how do we um How do we mitigate the risks of a changing climate and um take proactive actions now to deal with a problem that will That will hit us later. Okay. We're just got a couple minutes left So we'll squeeze a couple more in I think it's a quickie One question. Uh, how do you assign fire attribution in terms of uh lightning versus? human cause Yeah, that's a it's a great question that information is actually done on the ground by government agencies and and representatives who are tasked with determining cause of individual fire events and Um There's a wealth of data available in those government records and we explored about a million and a half records And so we didn't make that designation that designation was made on the ground By incident teams who were tasked with with figuring out how that fire actually started Gribing fires in the western u.s. Is challenging. Are there common ways? To control I'm not I'm not exactly sure what that's going for their common ways control a wildfire. How effective are they? Um, I assume that's in lieu of fire prescription Yeah, so um suppressing wildfires Is a very challenging task. I think the most effective Is actually cutting fire lines on the ground with bulldozers or hand lines and that's often supplemented with um water drops from airplanes, but ultimately It's using the topography and wind conditions and climate conditions and the the evening moisture and temperature drop to To try and control fires the other mechanism is actually using Backfires so setting fires That will run into the The the wildfire flame front is another mechanism But all of this is very expensive and very exhausting work That that also puts firefighters lives at risk too. And I think one thing that we're challenged with is actually Are we are we asking too much of our firefighting community in terms of protecting our homes? under a changing climate Well, we do have other questions coming in but we're approaching the end of the hour I really appreciate everybody who Participated respond to the polls sent in questions. Certainly. You would like to thank dr. Balch for excellent presentation And just the overall audience engagement and the turnout The slide that's up gives you the contact information that might be of interest if you have questions For dr. Balch herself There's her email address Similarly, if you have questions about the national academies board on earth sciences resources Or water science and technology board including ideas for topics you'd like to see covered in our webinar series Please reach out to the board director elizabeth aida If you haven't already subscribed to the board announcements through your registration for this webinar You can email ramy chiqueta also with the board and you can see their email addresses on the screen as well Slide deck and audio recording from today's webinar will be posted in roughly seven to ten days on the visa website And we'll be hosting another webinar in november. So please do watch your email for announcements about that Thanks again to jennifer and for everyone's participation and enjoy the rest of your day Thank you all for joining us today