 What has been your best success story in a fire effects monitoring project? We had, in 2002, the Rodeo-Chettiskei fire in Arizona. Well, probably the largest wildfire recorded in Arizona history. And we were asked, myself and my crew, were asked to help in monitoring the immediate post-fire effects. And I was very happy with the crew's response and the fact that our protocols were able to respond to what they wanted us to do. We took the protocols that we normally use and just massaged them a little bit and said, well, these are our, this is what the immediate post-fire effects look like. And what they were really concerned with was looking at areas that had been treated for fuels versus areas that it hadn't. But you could actually see, it was incredible, the difference you could see whether the area had been, to use an overused term, nuked on one side of the road and then on the other side of the road where it had been treated previously, several years even, there were green trees still there. I guess one of the most successful projects I've had recently with my crew is a mechanical treatment monitoring project that we just started this year. And it's a new protocol with new objectives. And the crew and I sat down together to discuss why we were monitoring this project, what our objectives were and what the best methodology would be to monitor them. And we looked at the literature and they, the crew was involved in deciding how to monitor. And we have the latitude to do that because it's a new protocol and because mechanical treatment monitoring is new for us. And with that level of involvement, those employees, not only did they come up with a great methodology for monitoring, but they really dove into it and did an outstanding job and their creativity and good quality work really paid off for us. Alrighty, the next question is, what fire effects monitoring assignment had the biggest surprise for you? Two years ago at Grand Canyon, we had the swamp ridge complex of mainly fire use fires and in that we had 18 of our FMH plots that just happened to burn by sheer chance. So it gave us something great to be able to assess the effects of these fire use fires when normally we don't have anything set up in advance of them. And one of the most surprising things about it was that with these 18 plots and a wide variety of fire behaviors immediately post-burned, there wasn't a single tree, overstory tree that we said had died. Now, we normally wait until five years out to assess that, but people want to know, how many trees died? How many trees died? We said, well, at least on these 18 plots, immediately after the fire, we wouldn't say any of them had died yet, which was pretty non-surprising and I think was a really good indicator of how well fire use can behave if all the proper management practices are taken and it's being allowed to burn at the right time. Prescribed burn that we had right outside of Moab, the surprising thing was is the amount of birds, wild turkey and elk that actually came into the site no more than about three weeks after the burn. All right, now thinking of one of your recent fire effects monitoring projects and it could be in the last few years or so, what did you learn from that project that you think others might benefit from? I'm constantly surprised and this is certainly important about how our data may be used once they leave our control and I know Diane mentioned how important it is for the crew to be professional and involved in what they're doing and also we need to follow up in that manner with where our data are used. I found that it's important to be real clear what the objectives are for the monitoring because a lot of people just say just go monitor but without knowing exactly what the question is, you don't know how to design the plots or how many to put in or where to put them. We really have to work with managers to convince them that you can't monitor unless you have objectives and they'll come up with an objective like we want to return the natural fire behavior to the landscape. We want to reintroduce fire. That is not measurable. You can't monitor a goal, you can't monitor a concept and so there is a lot of give and take with those managers trying to articulate an objective that can be measured. One thing that I found helpful in getting those specific objectives is looking at the burn plan because it'll have things like we want to present tree mortality and that's something you can measure and it's there. Something on more of a not project specific basis but that I've learned in the time that I've been in this job is that as far as seasonal employees go sometimes they'll only grow if you really allow them to. I guess I've been getting less controlling as the years go by and trying to give more work opportunities and more decision making ability to the season. I've just been really impressed with the results and realized that yeah maybe they don't always do everything quite to the standards that I would hope but they come up with some things that I never think of but the other thing is if you are going to be giving them more leeway be ready to give both positive and negative feedback because they need to be able to grow and learn to not just get the chance for freedom and then not hear anything back. We do need to link the practical and the data. What's it saying? Obviously we are collecting a lot of information that can be very, very useful but what has worked is a one or two page lesson learned on a particular project that you're 90% complete or done with implementing the project. The line officers love seeing that kind of information. Fire management officers burn boss. What actually worked and what can we improve on and make it more of a learning environment rather than a defensive environment? Two years ago at Grand Canyon. We did our first prescribed burn since before Cerro Grande and everyone was itching to finally get fire on the ground and honestly looking at it in advance everyone who was kind of on the wet side of things was late in the season, it was late October and we kind of started and then it rained and we waited a couple weeks and kind of dried out and then it was November and well maybe it's dry enough. Went ahead with the burn and really did a big air show and burned more than we originally sort of planned but it was still within the parameters and then we were done. We were like hey good job, we finally pulled it off. We got 3,000 acres done. Well we went out and read the plots going to the plots. You could see that it was really really cold burn. I mean there were enormous patches of unburned fuel and then we got the data and kind of gave them some feedback and said hey it was great and I understand the pressure to get the fire on the ground and do this but if we keep burning this late in the season we are not going to be meeting our objectives and they don't want to hear that and they're under different pressures than we are as the monitors but you still have to give that feedback. That pre-burn briefing the morning of the first ignition is really important because that's when you can tell everyone who is going to have a drip torch in their hand what the objectives of the project are and what to target with their drip torch and maybe what to not burn even though it will make a big cool looking flame we don't want to burn the cottonwood trees so ignite over in these kinds of vegetation instead and I think that really helps a great deal if the burn boss pushes it pretty hard to everyone on the burn. On some of your recent fire effects projects describe some of the best crew work that you've been with your crew and why did it work so well? We've got at Grand Canyon a couple of groups of plots that arrange such that it really makes sense to do about three of them in a day and in the past I've pretty much just told people okay we're going out, we're doing three and by the end of the day they're pretty much shot. This year though our schedule hadn't been as rigorous and I didn't feel like I had to force people to attempt the trifecta as we called it on these two sets of plots and we did the first two and it was getting late in the day and we were not going to finish the third one before the end of the day we couldn't walk out back to our vehicle and such and get home before close business and I honestly didn't think anyone would want to do them and before like I said I always made people do them and both times this came up the crew said that's okay we don't care if it takes longer whatever let's get them done we're out here and I guess it surprised me a bit the fact that both instances they chose to do this really impressed me you know we work in a fire organization and it's a pretty rules and regulation militaristic style in some cases but our employees are botanists they're natural resources people and they don't respond well to to military discipline and you know severe rules and regulations they just are a different breed I'm glad you guys said that because I I feel like I've been in the exact same boat and really this last year I changed my hiring practices a bit to intentionally hire the best crew dynamic rather than to hire the most efficient crew I'd always hired before this year I always tried to hire people who seemed to be the most qualified had the best skill set and would really just be able to bang out the plots and we had heavier plot workloads in previous years too in a way it was good but we also had poor crew dynamics but this last year I intentionally hired people who were maybe less experienced who I don't know I just got the impressions or interviews and such that they would be a better crew person I didn't hire individuals so much as I was trying to hire a team and we also had less of a intensive plot workload so that of course helped in that strategizing but I just got lucky because it worked out great what was the most significant thing you learned of any of the prescribed fire fires that were successful after a prescribed fire about a year after we found that the fuel loading was actually higher than it had been because of the scorching and all the needles and branches falling down and so the fire guys realized that multiple entries are going to be necessary that you can't do it all just in one and so the data fed back into the burn plan there's one that I wasn't necessarily involved in but I looked at some data on when I used to work at Alaska Volcanic National Park in California and I did sort of an informal study of how effective their prescribed burns were in relation to their fire effects data and also their fuel moistures and prescriptive parameters one thing that I found is that very few of their burns really were meeting objectives they were generally too cool the one that definitely did also had the most spots and was the greatest hazard so I mean that's really kind of empirical data but I'd say based on my experience with a lot of other burns you know if a lot of objectives are based on it seems like if you're going to meet them you have to burn a little bit hotter than a lot of managers are willing to burn how about the last question then what's the most significant thing you learned on prescribed fire you were involved in that went out of the prescription I'm thinking of a couple of prescribed fires that got away that I've looked at and no structures were threatened some the boundary was breached but otherwise no humans or life or property were threatened but I have to say that those were the best resource burns I've ever seen when the prescription maybe the weather changed and the fire behavior increased to the point where it crossed the burn boundary and went up the hill that hill looks great and the outlet fire from 2000 I think I wasn't actually there when the outlet fire happened and that one definitely was prescribed fire that got away and the two things that I think we can really learn from that the first is that it proved a lot of mixed conifer type habitat on the North Rim and people were bemoaning the loss of all of that after it happened it didn't take long in fact less than two months after the burn the Aspen regeneration in those areas was incredible beyond belief and I don't think anyone necessarily anticipated that we know that Aspen is an early successional species and it would respond probably well but I think everyone was probably a little bit shocked about how well it responded one of our objectives on a prescribed burn was just a broadcast burn and ponderous pine to reduce some of the understory and we had it was rimmed by Gamble Oak and Aspen and it was a late season prescribed burn and my instructions to the crew were to black line the unit and run it right into the Gamble Oak and Aspen is a natural barrier to containing the fire well we all woke up the next morning and there was fire off the rim down off this one edge it just did not occur to me until we all looked at it that it was late season Aspen that it had six weeks to dry with leaves were off so it kind of crept its way down the bottom of the hill and it was definitely unsafe to put anybody in there to cut it off because there was just too many snags did anybody else have anything they wanted to add to either any of the questions or anything