 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 in an area that had burned and fire effects that I'd never seen before. I was really amazed. It was really kind of sad in a way. So, we were able to give them the crew in their time and then also collect information for them and contribute to a fire effects report. 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 that they paid off for us. Alrighty, the next question is, what fire effects monitoring assignment had the biggest surprise for you? I set up a bunch of plots in preparation for prescribed burns and some of them didn't get burned due to weather or whatever. Some of them didn't get burned and so they've been sitting there for four years and they turned out to be a good way to monitor the bark beetle mortality that has happened in the last two years. Because I had the before data, I didn't know I was getting it, but I had it and then I was able to go back and re-measure and see what the tree mortality was. So even though those plots seemed like they weren't doing anything, they turned out to be quite useful. I was surprised at the regenerative capabilities of the forest for the North Slope, on the North Slope during the Helens II fire this past summer. We went out to try and collect some preliminary erosion data just by spray painting the rebar on the plots that we had out there. And when we went out there, it was about two weeks after the fire and some of the ridge lines had gotten, for lack of a better word, nuked. And so we had a whole bunch of just overstory sticks, black sticks, essentially hanging out. And underneath those, PTAC, Brackenfern, had already started to reclaim the soil. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 it was a really good indicator of how well fire use can behave if, you know, all the management, proper management practices are taken and it's, you know, being allowed to burn at the right time. And then there was one plot in particular that we went back to and just this last year we got our two-year data on it and every single poultry on it, which was white fur and we were trying to reduce the amount of white fur. This was where the Monterey type work got white fur sort of encroaching on pure ponderosa. Every single white fur pole was dead. Not a single overstory ponderosa was dead. Maybe two or three overstory white fur had died, but every single pole. So I was quite impressed. I've never seen that type of success, at least in terms of reducing, you know, pole densities within any of our prescribed fires because we're generally not willing to burn that hot because there's too much of a chance of it getting up into the canopy. But, I mean, it's really nice. It's quite surprising and impressive. But on a 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. And I was just kind of curious how other folks may monitor, you know, wildlife effects from fire. I think we do a pretty good job at monitoring the hard data, but does anybody use anything to monitor, you know, benefits to wildlife? Is there a protocol? I don't know if there's what you might call a quantitative protocol, but I in the past have done a lot of aerial surveillance flights where you look at the wintering ungulates and where they're distributed in comparison to burned and unburned areas. And ungulates use those prescribed burns, especially in the springtime when the soil is warm because of the blackened earth and the more nutritious regrowth is found. And so, I don't know, I guess in some of my previous work we used prescribed burns in order to distribute elk away from feed ground areas where they were artificially fed because if you can train them using a very attractive kind of forage to stray away from the feed grounds in the spring, then they're less likely to spread diseases like brucellosis to each other. So, we've been able to manipulate their distribution using burns and we're trying to do the same thing with bighorn sheep to try to train them to go back to some of those ranges that they previously used before they were choked with trees. Alright, 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 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 or what data to collect. So it's important to spend time upfront with the people you're working with and probably really question them hard and nail down what the purpose of the project is so that you can do a good job in getting the right data. 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's a goal. That is not measurable. Yeah, it's not a measure. And 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. And one of the neat things that's a success story for me is that I worked with the Bridger Teton National Forest to write some guidelines that specified minimum acceptable monitoring requirements for all prescribed burns on the forest. And the first thing that those prescribed burns have to have are measurable objectives. And then there's a minimum requirement for monitoring and then kind of a menu that managers can choose from to use other protocols to do additional monitoring of whatever their objectives dictate. One thing that I've found helpful in getting those specific objectives is looking at the burn plan because it'll have things like we want 10% tree mortality and that's something that 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. I've realized that maybe they don't always do everything quite 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. To stay with the seasonal employee, one thing I've found is that it gets hard sometimes because they want to get out into the field and I do too. It's eight in the morning and we want to be at our plot already but the extra hour in the office making sure everyone knows where the plots are going how many we're doing do we have every piece of equipment do we have extras it really saves us a lot of time throughout the course of the summer just spending the extra couple hours doing that. Fire Effects Monitoring crews are a different breed of cat. They're smart and they're critical thinkers and I think when I present my Fire Effects data to managers that I should be nervous because it's an important presentation and they might have hard questions to ask but really my hardest critics are the crews themselves because they want to do it right and if I propose to do something that's a little bit questionable or doesn't make sense to them then they'll put their foot down. Although I do support the flexibility of these folks being able to kind of do their own thing but at the same time you also need at least a standard basic template that you can follow through on year to year so that data continues to have some integrity. We have regional protocols that they're not required but they are compatible with the database that we use in the Forest Service so if you're going to input the data in that database then you're going to use these protocols so we introduce them to the Forest Service up to them if they choose to use them or not so we promote them. There's something else that I've learned which is to allow plenty of time after the field work to do the data analysis because one field day generates at least one office day of work and that is the data entry in the report writing that takes a lot of time. 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 the 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? It's a very good policy. 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 it 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 it kind of dried out I remember 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 about what 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 and even just 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 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 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 that's when you can tell everyone who's 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'll 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 something that I've found in terms of trying to market the program or make people aware of what we're doing is just talking to people informally seems to be as successful as anything else I make a point of stopping and just visit with the fire guys and take any opportunity when I'm riding in the truck with them somewhere to talk about the program doing and all the great results we're getting and that seems to get through better with the email reports that I sent out another reason why they would be interested in our data is for external relations to share with the press and with the general public when we're telling the story about all the good work we're doing it really helps to have the numbers and the specific data yeah this is what we did and it makes it a lot more believable and so that's one reason why the managers would really want to know what we're doing 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 plots that are a couple of groups of plots that are arranged 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 you know 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 one thing we try to do is have some of the same people monitoring the fire behavior and the weather during a project as are going to be monitoring the vegetation afterward and hopefully who have been out there monitoring vegetation monitoring and those individuals they get to see the whole piece of the pie and that's great and consistency is really important because of that but one of the hardest things we've struggled with is how to best monitor a burn while it's being conducted what is the best way to collect data that can be used to compare the fire behavior and the weather to the results on the ground and that's tough because there's a lot of safety concern you can't stand in the middle of a prescribed burn project with your thermometer out there with the flaming front coming toward you our last prescribed burn we had a series of hobos just those units scattered throughout the burn in addition to two groups of FEMOS taking weather every half hour where they were out they would just mark their location and do it and I think we got decent coverage I mean we worked perfect but we were pretty good 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 military discipline and you know severe rules and regulations they they just are a different breed and I'm glad you guys said that because I I feel like I'm 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 had always hired before this year and 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 so 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 we also had less of an intensive plot workload so that of course helped in that strategizing but I just got lucky because it worked out great now so you have a different situation because it's usually just you and one other crew so your crew dynamics must be interesting because it's I feel very fortunate that I've always had really good people that I like being out in the field with and I think I do pay attention to those personal characteristics when I hire people you know it's someone who can get along with other people but their work satisfaction has a direct impact on our success when it comes to having good quality data that we can use for adaptive management if they're angry or disenchanted or frustrated or distracted any sort of bone-headed mistake that they might make out there you know six miles into the field will directly impair our ability to do our job and so it is important to keep them invested in good work and if they're not invested we pay the price what was the most significant thing you learned of any of the prescribed fires that were successful where you met the objectives you know really you were proud of that burn and what did you learn from that well after a fire when the trees are scorched it's hard to tell if they're going to live or die and I guess I learned sort of through the grapevine that a lot depends on the weather after a fire whether they live or die and you know we made our best guess and turned out a lot of them lived that we thought were going to die on a particular prescribing we usually are really conservative with that ourselves and like in a ponderosa if there's any well any tree if there's any green we say it's still alive we only call it dead once it really is dead because yeah a drought or a wet year might really affect that and I kind of wonder had we not had such a severe drought after our 2001 fire use fires at Grand Canyon you know how many fewer of those trees wouldn't have died you know they're not too many did but I kind of wonder if almost all of them would have made it there's one that I wasn't necessarily involved in but I looked at some data on when I used to work at the Pasa 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're generally too cool the one that definitely did also had the most spots and was the greatest hazard to the people there 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 especially if you're going to meet all of them like reduce pole densities and reduce fuels meet reduce fuels with a light surface fire but if you're going to reduce pole densities it's got to be a little hotter and if you're trying to meet all of those in the entry burn cycle it's often beyond the level of comfort that managers have with human safety and as they should that should be that's the first concern in any burn but I guess I don't know if I'm frustrated by that but I've always kind of noticed that seems like yeah if you're going to meet all of your objectives in general you're going to have more problems than you're willing to deal with so you either have to be content with scaling back objectives or just meeting a few of them or relying on multiple entries into a unit to achieve all of the objectives but most of the objectives at least at Grand Canyon aren't really written like that they're just kind of written and they don't say how many entries it's going to take to realistically achieve this and maybe that's because we don't have enough data yet of the feedback loop but that's what I've noticed you know if you don't meet your objectives one of your options is to change your monitoring change your objectives to something that's more achievable and not just change implementation sometimes we've had to change our objectives to something that is reasonable for us to achieve with prescribed fire when a stand replacing wildfire is the kind of fire behavior that would give us the results we wanted we're not going to have one of those so at least in areas near developments so for example where the data was useful is after 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 something that they suspected was probably true and now they had data to show it how about the last question then what's the most significant thing you learned on prescribed fire you were involved in when out of 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 all of our objectives are achieved on that hill and it's really gratifying to see fire effects on the landscape that are exactly what we like to see but if you think about it we're in a stand replacing fire regime and if we want the results of a stand replacing fire we have to have one and if we have a very controlled late fall early spring ground fire we're not going to get there so sometimes fires that get away yeah on the teach us something that's worth learning the outlet fire from 2000 I think I wasn't actually there when the outlet fire happened and that's 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 nuked a lot of mixed conifer type habitat in the north rim and people were of course bemoaning the loss of all of that after it happened well it didn't take long in fact less than two months after the burn the aspen regeneration in those areas was it 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 is probably a little bit shocked about how well it responded because the heat I think got enough in the ground without sterilizing it that all those old root suckers just shot straight up and maintaining aspen on the north rim or increasing it has been one of our sort of unstated objectives and it's been decreasing because of fire suppression and well hey there's going to be a lot more aspen after that one of our objectives on a prescribed burn was just a broadcast burn and ponderous pine to reduce some of the understory and 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 as a natural barrier to containing the fire well we all woke up the next morning and there was fire off the rim you know down off this one edge and 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 you know leaves were off and so it kind of crept its way down the bottom of the hill and it was definitely unsafe to put anybody in there to you know cut it off because there was just too many snags. Well we've been talking about fire the whole time but on the Prescott we do other kinds of fuels reduction as well and I monitor those too so we have brush crushes and we have goats and I have plots out in those areas and so that's very interesting information as well. Right and that would be really good interesting information to share and the effects of that.