House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing, June 29, 2021.
In a hearing Tuesday before the House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee the topic was “The state of federal wildland fire science: examining opportunities for further research and coordination.” And just as promised, many topics were recommended for additional development and research.
There were four witnesses:
Dr. Craig B. Clements, San Jose State University
Dr. Jessica McCarty, Miami University
George Geissler, Washington DNR
Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg (Ret), International Association of Fire Chiefs
If you don’t have two and a half hours to watch the video below of the entire hearing, you can watch the prepared five-minute presentations of the four witnesses and get a good idea of the topics that were discussed. They begin at 26:30.
I made a list of the topics that were mentioned as needing more research:
Better systems for fire detection and modeling.
Systems for tracking the real time location of firefighters and other resources.
Increase the budget for the Joint Fire Science Program, which was cut in half during the last four years.
Fire weather.
Deploy on fires what would be the equivalent of hurricane hunter aircraft for real time monitoring of fires and weather at fires.
Treat fire weather the same as other severe weather phenomena.
Continuous real time high resolution imagery of fires.
Operational community-based coupled fire atmosphere models.
Better geospatial and temporal resolution for monitoring fires.
Improved and standardized warning system for fires.
If you would like to see another point of view, check out a July 1 interview with Mark Finney by Saul Elbein in The Hill. Mr. Finney is a Research Forester with the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. Early in the piece Mr. Finney said more prescribed fire was needed.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Equilibrium: What do you feel is missing from an approach centered on suppressing big fires?
Finney: The issue is, reactive management rarely works. My analogy is health care — if all health care was emergency rooms and ambulances, you’d have a health care disaster on your hands.
Because there’d be no preventive care. You’d have ambulances everywhere, people getting rushed off. But by the time you have emergency care, it’s too late.
People get engaged in looking for better satellites or mapping or sensors thinking: If we get better at reacting, we’ll solve the problem.
But that’s not true. If nature picks the time, place and conditions to start a fire, and you run around and deal — then you’re a moron. You’re just playing defense. You can’t win any contest by playing defense.
Despite widespread recognition that treating forests and grasslands with prescribed fire can be a major step toward reducing the negative impacts of wildfires, only one primary Federal land management agency made a substantial increase in the number of hectares accomplished from 1988 to 2018 — the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A higher proportion of tribal lands managed by the BIA have been subject to prescribed fire than for any other agency, with a mean of 7.5% of tribal lands burned each year.
This conclusion was expressed in a paper written by Crystal A. Kolden of the University of Idaho, titled, “We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk.” The last section of the document, the Discussion, is below. It begins with the statement that many may disagree with — the Southeastern states have fewer wildfire disasters than the rest of the country because they accomplished over twice the amount of prescribed fire as the entire rest of the US combined between 1998 and 2018. However, later she writes about the West, “[T]he topography is more complex and inaccessible, burn windows are narrow, and fuels have built up throughout decades of fire exclusion.” There are also challenges in the West in dealing with restrictions imposed by air quality agencies, more so than in the Southeast.
The paper also points out another rarely mentioned factor that limits the use of prescribed fire on Federal lands. “[Agencies] have not made sufficient policy changes or budgetary allocations to carry out the Cohesive Strategy.” Which, she writes, “…specifically identified prescribed fire as the most cost-effective solution over the largest potential area of the US, as compared to managed wildfire and non-fire vegetation treatment.”
Below is the Discussion section of the paper.
Discussion
The Southeastern US accomplished over twice the amount of prescribed fire as the entire rest of the US combined between 1998 and 2018. This may be one of many reasons why the Southeastern states have experienced far fewer wildfire disasters relative to the Western US in recent years. The amount of prescribed fire reported in the Southeastern US is also likely underreported, as the Southeastern states have purportedly accomplished millions of hectares of prescribed fire annually for decades. However, until 1998 there was no central prescribed fire reporting in the US. Even after 1998, non-federal entities did not necessarily report the full scope of their accomplishments in the federal reporting system.
The dramatic difference in prescribed fire completed between east and west reflects both a broad socio-cultural divide over fire and a problematic dichotomy between federal and non-federal fire management. Biophysical conditions have often been highlighted as a challenge to prescribed burning in the Western US; the topography is more complex and inaccessible, burn windows are narrow, and fuels have built up throughout decades of fire exclusion. By contrast, the Southeastern states have both the most extensive Wildland–Urban Interface in the US and some of the worst air quality challenges associated with prescribed fire due to higher humidity (e.g., increased smog formation). That agencies are able to accomplish so much prescribed fire in such a populated region likely also reflects social acceptance in addition to more conducive conditions. It is also telling that no single Southern state is driving the regional trend. State summaries in the Historical Wildland Fire Summary reports indicate that Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas all completed an average of over 40,000 ha per year each from 2002 to 2017.
Prescribed fire is widely accepted as a tool in the Southeastern states, where residents are more accustomed to using controlled fire to enhance timber production, control the rapidly growing vegetation, and enhance game species habitat. Some states, such as Florida, even have laws that recognize prescribed fire as being in the public interest and protect landowner rights to utilize it. Although studies throughout the US have shown that residents in all regions broadly support the concept of prescribed fire, they fear the potential for escaped fires and they are also highly concerned about smoke impacts [41]. However, Engebretson et al. found significantly higher tolerance of prescribed fire smoke from Southern-state residents than those in Western states, which suggests that this tolerance may translate into less opposition to using prescribed fire in the Southern GACC. This is true for either federal or non-federal agencies in the region; the Historical Summaries indicate that much of the USFS annual prescribed fire accomplishment occurs in the Southern GACC states (particularly along the Gulf Coast) rather than in the Western states where the greatest proportion of USFS land lies.
By contrast, fire managers in the Western US face considerable social barriers to using prescribed fire, including negative public perceptions of risk of escapes and smoke. This high perception of risk has been cemented by the occasional escaped prescribed fire, but it has likely also become entrenched due to the absence of prescribed fire demonstrated here. Fire managers, particularly federal fire managers, receive insufficient incentive to use prescribed fire under current agency policies that incentivize fire suppression (e.g., with overtime pay and promotion) but penalize risk-taking, particularly when escaped prescribed fires occur. Additionally, federal funding for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction activities has been drastically depleted over the past two decades as large wildfires force federal agencies to expend allocated funds on suppression rather than prevention.
Of the federal agencies reporting individually (i.e., separate from the ST/OT class), only the BIA has been able to substantially increase the relative use of prescribed fire. This increase is particularly striking because a higher proportion of tribal lands managed by BIA have been subject to prescribed fire than for any other agency, with a mean of 7.5% of tribal lands burned each year. This may reflect the more recent efforts of tribes seeking to reclaim sovereignty on their ancestral lands through increased self-governance and drawing upon TEK to re-introduce extensive intentional fire in these landscapes, particularly following the 2004 Tribal Forest Protection Act. The push for more prescribed fire among tribes is also reflected in the BIA budget for prescribed fire, particularly compared with the fire suppression budget. BIA devotes the second-highest budget of the five primary land management agencies to prescribed fire (behind USFS), but the prescribed fire budget is between 50% and 80% of its fire suppression budget, while no other agency’s prescribed fire budget has exceeded 25% of its fire suppression budget in the last five years. It is also worth noting that the more detailed Historical Wildland Fire Summary reports suggest that the strong positive trend in the Eastern GACC region is potentially partially a function of increased tribal burning in that region.
Despite changes in federal fire management policy meant to increase prescribed fire use, only one region of the US has considerably increased the amount of prescribed fire completed, and credit for much of this increase goes to non-federal agencies. Given the evidence that federal agencies have not accomplished more prescribed fire across the US over the past two decades, this suggests that while the Cohesive Strategy incorporates the best available science in a top-level holistic management framework, federal agencies have not made sufficient policy changes or budgetary allocations to carry out the Strategy.
There is considerable evidence in the scientific literature that prescribed fire is the most effective means of reducing the risk of wildfire disasters and increasing ecosystem resilience across much of the US. However, only one primary federal land management agency has substantially increased prescribed fire use, and the only widespread use and acceptance of prescribed fire is in the Southeastern states. Federal and non-federal entities have used the prescribed fire expertise of the Southeastern region as a training ground for fire and fuel managers across the US, but this has not translated to increased prescribed fire use. This suggests that a larger cultural shift in public sociocultural perceptions of prescribed fire is needed to truly capitalize upon the utility of prescribed fire and more aggressively reduce wildfire risk. Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.
The graphics are from the paper written by Crystal A. Kolden.
Fire 2019, 2(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
Boney Creek Fire in Alaska, July 19, 2019. Photo by Camila Roy, BLM.
Spatiotemporal patterns of overwintering fire in Alaska
By Rebecca Scholten and Sander Veraverbeke Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
What are holdover and overwintering fires?
Fires can appear to be out, but retain smoldering combustion deep in the fuelbed and flare up again when the weather favors flaming behavior and fire spread. This phenomenon occurs not infrequently in boreal forests of North America, and presents a well-known challenge to firefighters. Over the last two decades, fire managers noted increasing occurrences where fires survive the cold and wet boreal winter months by smoldering, and re-emerged in the subsequent spring.
Scientists and managers seek better understanding of how these fires sustain during such unfavorable conditions. Fire managers have already started targeting locations where they expect fires to flare up again. However, they are missing detailed information on the environmental and climatic factors that facilitate these fires. This information is crucial to detect fires at an early stage and keep firefighting costs low. A research group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is studying when and where these holdover fires emerge and how their occurrence is tied to specific geographic locations.
Mapping overwintering fires from satellite data
Since 2005, fire managers reported data on 39 holdover fires that survived winter in Alaska. However, the location and emergence date of these fires were used in conjunction with satellite data to develop an algorithm for overwintering holdover detection. From satellite imagery, we can only observe fires that are large enough to generate a considerable amount of heat and burn a large enough area. Consequently, 32 out of 39 reported overwintering fires were too small (all smaller than 11 ha, 25 out of 32 smaller than 1 ha) to be detected from space. The location and emergence date of these small overwintering fires were used for the calibration of an algorithm focused on large overwintering fires. From the remaining seven large reported overwintering fires, our algorithm classified 6 out of 7 as overwintering fire. In addition, our approach revealed 9 large overwintering fires that were not reported by agencies between 2002 and 2018 in Alaska. A results paper is currently in preparation.
The spread rate of smoldering fires is known to be very low, and a smoldering fire would spread only between 100 and 250 m in an entire year (Rein, 2013). So, overwintered fires usually emerge within or close to the previous year fire (Fig.1) and can re-emerge with flaming behavior as soon as favorable burning conditions appear in spring develop in to flaming forest fires before the major lightning-induced fire season. The onset of warm and dry conditions varies from year to year depending on the winter and spring temperatures and precipitation. These variables also shape the regional snowmelt day, which can be inferred from satellite observations. Indeed, our research indicates that holdover fires usually re-emerge within 50 days after the regional snowmelt. Overwintering fires are more likely to occur the year after a large fire
year (Fig. 2).
Figure 2: Years with a large burned area (grey bars) are more likely to generate overwintering flare-ups (orange bars) than years with less burned area. Rebecca Scholten and Sander Veraverbeke.
Can we predict where overwintering may re-emerge?
It is not only important to know when these fires emerge, but also where. We therefore analyzed spatial drivers of the overwintering fires we detected. Our research indicates that holdover fires are facilitated in those regions of a fire perimeter that had burned deeper into the organic soil the year before. Deep burning is a characteristic of a high severity fire. We also observed that overwintering fires were more likely to emerge in lowland areas with black spruce-dominated forest. Overwintering fires thus have some temporal and spatial predictability. Monitoring the edges of fire perimeters from the preceding year in lowland forested peatlands early in the fire season, and especially after a year with large burned area, may prove beneficial to extinguish flare-ups from overwintering fires before they develop into a large flaming forest fire. This could be a cost-efficient strategy for fire management agencies. In addition, this would preserve terrestrial carbon by safeguarding it from combustion.
This article is from the Alaska Fire Science Consortium’s Fire Science Highlights.
Evidence for anthropogenic fire 85,000 years ago in Africa may reflect intentional use at the landscape scale, widespread populations creating more or larger on-site ignitions, alteration of fuel availability through harvesting of the understory, or a combination of these activities.
Mastery of fire has given humans dominance over the natural world. A Yale-led study provides the earliest evidence to date of ancient humans significantly altering entire ecosystems with flames.
The study, published on May 5 in the journal Science Advances, combines archaeological evidence — dense clusters of stone artifacts dating as far back as 92,000 years ago — with paleoenvironmental data on the northern shores of Lake Malawi in eastern Africa to document that early humans were ecosystem engineers. They used fire in a way that prevented regrowth of the region’s forests, creating a sprawling bushland that exists today.
“This is the earliest evidence I have seen of humans fundamentally transforming their ecosystem with fire,” said Jessica Thompson, assistant professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the paper’s lead author. “It suggests that by the Late Pleistocene, humans were learning to use fire in truly novel ways. In this case, their burning caused replacement of the region’s forests with the open woodlands you see today.”
Thompson authored the study with 27 colleagues from institutions in the United States, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Thompson led the archaeological work in collaboration with the Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments; David Wright of the University of Oslo, who led efforts to date the study’s archaeological sites; and Sarah Ivory of Penn State, who led the paleoenvironmental analyses.
Stone Age artifacts excavated near the shores of Lake Malawi in eastern Africa, combined with paleoenvironmental data drawn from the lakebed, provides the earliest evidence of ancient humans manipulating their ecosystem with fire.
The artifacts examined by the researchers are of the type produced across Africa in the Middle Stone Age, a period dating back at least 315,000 years. The earliest modern humans made their appearance during this period, with the African archaeological record showing significant advances in cognitive and social complexity.
Thompson and Wright logged several field seasons of archaeological work in the region before a conversation with Ivory helped them make sense of the patterns they observed in their data. The researchers discovered that the regional archaeological record, its ecological changes, and the development of alluvial fans near Lake Malawi — an accumulation of sediment eroded from the region’s highland — dated to the same period of origin, suggesting that they were connected.
Landscape evolution and ecology of the northern Lake Malawi basin.
Lake Malawi’s water levels have fluctuated drastically over the ages. During the lake’s driest periods, the last of which ended about 85,000 years ago, it diminished into two small, saline bodies of water. The lake recovered from these arid stretches and its levels have remained high ever since, according to the study.
The archaeological data were collected from more than 100 pits excavated across hundreds of kilometers of the alluvial fan that developed during this time of steady lake levels. The paleoenvironmental data are based on counts of pollen and charcoal that settled to the floor of the lakebed and were later recovered in a long sediment core drilled from a modified barge.
According to the researchers, the data revealed that a spike in charcoal accumulation occurred shortly before the flattening of the region’s species richness — the number of distinct species inhabiting it. Despite the consistently high lake levels, which imply greater stability in the ecosystem, the species richness went flat following the last arid period based on information from fossilized pollen sampled from the lakebed, the study found. This was unexpected because over previous climate cycles, rainy environments had produced forests that provide rich habitat for an abundance of species, Ivory explained.
Excavations yielded dense clusters of stone artifacts dating as far back as 92,000 years ago.
“The pollen that we see in this most recent period of stable climate is very different than before,” she said. “Specifically, trees that indicate dense, structurally complex forest canopies are no longer common and are replaced by pollen from plants that deal well with frequent fire and disturbance.”
The increase in archaeological sites after the last arid period, paired with the spike in charcoal and absence of forest, suggests that people were manipulating the ecosystem with fire, the researchers conclude. The scale of their environmental impact over the long term is something typically associated with farmers and herders, rather than hunter-gatherers. This suggests early ecological manipulation on par with modern people and may also explain why the archaeological record formed.
The burning paired with climate-driven changes created the conditions that allowed for preservation of millions of artifacts in the region, the researchers explained. “Dirt rolls downhill unless there is something to stop it,” Wright said. “Take the trees away, and when it rains, there is a lot of dirt moving downhill in this environment.”
Previous transitions from dry to wet conditions in the region didn’t yield a similar alluvial fan and were not preceded by the same charcoal spike, the researchers noted.
It’s not clear why people were burning the landscape, Thompson said. It’s possible that they were experimenting with controlled burns to produce mosaic habitats conducive to hunting and gathering, a behavior documented among hunter-gatherers. It could be that their fires burned out of control, or that there were simply a lot of people burning fuel in their environment that provided for warmth, cooking, or socialization, she explained.
“One way or another, it’s caused by human activity,” she said. “It shows early people, over a long period of time, took control over their environment rather than being controlled by it. They changed entire landscapes, and for better or for worse that relationship with our environments continues today.”
This work was funded by the Australian Research Council, the National Geographic-Waitt Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Queensland Archaeological Field School, the Korean Research Foundation Global Research Network, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Emory University, and the Belmont Forum.
National Institute of Justice commits over half a million dollars to improve training and guidelines for wildfire investigations
North Pole Fire, March 10, 2015, South Dakota. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
A skilled wildfire origin and cause investigator can look at burn and char patterns on vegetation and other objects and follow them to the location where the blaze first ignited. If they are lucky, that could lead to the discovery of the cause and other physical evidence which could help track down an arsonist.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researcher Albert Simeoni has been awarded $519,893 from the National Institute of Justice to evaluate the reliability of burn pattern indicators used by investigators to determine the starting point of wildfires.
Albert Simeoni. WPI photo.
Simeoni, professor and head of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, will use a laboratory wind tunnel at WPI, field studies in a New Jersey forest, and data analysis to determine if scars on a landscape, ash deposits, and other indicators widely used by investigators reliably point to the place where a wildfire originates.
“Investigations are based on burn pattern indicators that have not been scientifically verified, and those investigations have consequences for the people who are impacted by fire, for government agencies, and for companies,” said Simeoni, who is principal investigator of the three-year project. “We want to be sure that investigations are done with the best tools available. We’re not reinventing tools with this study, but we’re looking at the reliability of the tools currently used.”
Wildfires burn millions of acres annually in the United States, causing extensive and costly damage to natural ecosystems, homes, and businesses. Simeoni, a former firefighter, has previously studied how wind impacts wildfires, and he has coordinated training for Greek firefighters combatting wildfires.
Finding the origin of a wildfire can help explain how it started and who might be responsible. Investigators typically examine the shape of burnt grass, the angle of char left behind, craters formed into rocks, marks on buildings, and other physical signs of damage to trace a fire across a landscape and back to its origin point.
Simeoni will study fire indicators in the field in collaboration with firefighters from the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, who manage controlled fires in the New Jersey pine barrens. Simeoni also will conduct studies in a 20-foot wind tunnel at WPI, burning pine needles and other materials under varying conditions such as wind speed, fire intensity, and moisture. Finally, he will compare results from field and lab studies with the results of investigations conducted into fires that burned under similar conditions.
Nicholas Skowronski, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, will be co-principal investigator of the project. The project is funded by the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The project could, Simeoni said, validate existing forensic tools and help fire investigators work more efficiently and with fewer errors. He plans to make the study’s results available to private and public fire investigators.
“Understanding where a wildfire starts can help determine how it started and who, if anyone, may be criminally or financially liable for damages,” Simeoni said. “As a researcher and scientist, I also know that understanding how fires start can help us determine how to prevent, manage, and stop them.”
Stacked bar graph showing the number of new human- and lightning-caused fire occurrences (≥2 ha) for each day of the year from 1959 to 2018. Figure adapted from Coogan et al. 2020. (From “Fifty years of wildland fire science in Canada”)
A group of nine land managers and researchers in Canada have put together a compendium highlighting the country’s accomplishments in wildland fire science over the last 50 years. Information in the 296 pages plus more than 300 references covers five key developments and contributions:
The creation of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System;
The relationships between wildland fire and weather, climate, and climate change;
Fire ecology;
Operational decision support; and,
Wildland fire management.
There is also a case study about the evolution of wildland fire management in Banff National Park.
Annual area burned by wildfire and prescribed fire in Banff National Park from 1910 to 2018. Note the long period of fire exclusion from the 1940s until the early 1980s. (From “Fifty years of wildland fire science in Canada”)
The paper discusses additional research needs, including:
Further evaluation of fire severity measurements and effects;
Efficacy of fuel management treatments; Climate change effects and mitigation;
Further refinement of models pertaining to fire risk analysis, fire behaviour, and fire weather; and,
Integration of forest management and ecological restoration with wildland fire risk reduction.
Timeline of some key developments in Canadian wildland fire science by decade from the 1970s to the 2010s. FWI, Fire Weather Index System; FBP, Fire Behaviour Prediction System; NSERC, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. (From “Fifty years of wildland fire science in Canada”)
Authors of the referenced online document: Sean C.P. Coogan, Lori D. Daniels, Den Boychuk, Philip J. Burton, Mike D. Flannigan, Sylvie Gauthier, Victor Kafka, Jane S. Park, and B. Mike Wotton.
