Workshops

Organizers: Nathan Gill and Chuck McHugh

This morning workshop will provide an introduction to FlamMap software for participants who have little to no experience in fire behavior modeling.
This workshop will cover topics such as data management, visualization, and familiarization with the interface of FlamMap software. Our goal will be to have participants learn the basics of FlamMap and run a model so that they are prepared for further comparisons and analyses, either in the advanced workshop in the afternoon, or independently.

Organizers: Amelie Jeanneau, Hedwig van Delden, Fantina Tedim,  Douglas Radford

There is a pressing need to share knowledge on successful partnerships/collaborations for quickly adapting and improving wildfire management systems. This workshop will provide the opportunity for fire managers from diverse agencies, regions and countries to share their challenges, knowledge and successes around collaboratively planning and implementing risk reduction strategies.

This workshop’s primary purpose is to create a global map of collaborative wildfire risk reduction initiatives identifying the most common methods, where they are located and why these work or don’t. This event will provide a transdisciplinary platform where fire managers from diverse agencies, regions and countries can share their knowledge and experience, which could serve as a foundation to develop new approaches to reducing wildfire risk (e.g. blueprint).

This workshop proposes to use a range of round tables, games/role-play exercises and short presentations to

• Identify common spatial/temporal scale of wildfire risk management initiatives,
• Identify the type of stakeholders and organisations involved in these initiatives
• Identify and list the diverse local and organisational goals for the wildfire risk reduction strategies identified through this workshop,
• Identify the communication tools generally used for wildfire risk management and discuss what works or doesn’t
• Discuss with the group about tools and practices supporting effective risk reduction strategies in different countries and agencies and why these work. This will enable us to identify elements that can favour/limit the adoption of risk reduction initiatives.

The results from this work will be used to publish a short communication paper and a guideline document to help prepare risk reduction plans. All participants will be invited to co-author these publications and can decide to opt out if they are not interested.

Organizer: Erika Piroli

The workshop aims to bring together up to twenty fire-related stakeholders operating in Monterey County whose work is related to fire activities, such as land managers and/or owners, farmers, road managers, firefighters, forestry service, civil protection service, householders in the rural and WUI areas, but also NGOs and academia. 

A successful fire management strategy requires a deep understanding of environmental and socio-economic factors at the local level. Human activities impact fire regimes in complex ways, and different agents’ actions and incentives can directly or indirectly affect wildfire occurrence.

A comprehensive participatory approach involving stakeholders allows for a better understanding of their incentives and perspectives, which can then be incorporated into fire management policies. Using semi-structured participatory activities to be conducted over four hours, the workshop aims to identify the perceptions around stakeholders’ incentives and behaviours directly and indirectly related to firefighting activities in the jurisdictional area of Monterey, California. 

Organizers: Christine Stalling and Sarah Flanary

An overview of the Photoload Sampling Technique (Keane and Dickinson, 2007) will be presented with discussion of its development highlighting the quick and accurate fuel load measurements users are able to collect in the field. Hands-on training will be provided.

Estimates of fuel loadings in forest and rangeland ecosystems of the United States are critical for accurately predicting fire behavior and effects of alternative fuel and ecosystem restoration treatments. Accurately measuring surface fuel loadings in the field is difficult because it requires a complex integration of several sampling methods designed for implementation at disparate scales. The photoload sampling technique was developed to quickly and accurately estimate loadings for six surface fuel components using downward-looking and oblique photographs depicting sequences of graduated fuel loadings by fuel component. The six components are the four size classes of downed dead woody (1 hour, 10 hour, 100 hour, 1000 hr), shrub, and herbaceous fuels. This technique involves visually comparing fuel conditions observed in the field with photoload sequences to estimate fuel loadings. Photoload sequences are a series of downward-looking and close-up oblique photographs depicting a sequence of graduated fuel loadings of synthetic fuelbeds for each of the six fuel components. There is a standard sampling protocol that uses the developed photoload sequences to estimate fuel loading in the field. Photoload sequences considered for this workshop were developed for common fuel components of the northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, USA.