Fire and Environmental Research Applications Team

FERA HELPS ESTABLISH INTERNATIONAL FIRE MANAGEMENT ACTIONS ALLIANCE -- Dr. Ernesto Alvarado of the FERA team is a founding member of the FAO Fire Management Actions Alliance, established May 2007 at the 4th International Wildland Fire Conference held in Seville, Spain with the goal of is stimulating improved fire management and reducing damage from fire worldwide. Its objectives are to review and update the Fire Management Voluntary Guidelines; encourage stakeholders at all levels to adopt and use the Guidelines; review experiences from applying the Guidelines; and strengthen international cooperation in fire management.

http://www.fao.org/forestry/site/40476/en/

EOS FEATURES CLIMATE CHNAGE AND DISTURBANCE WORKSHOP -- EOS, a weekly publication of the American Geophysical Union, took note of the "Workshop on Climate Change and Disturbance Interactions in Western North America" held in Tucson in February 2007. The workshop was led by FERA's Dr. Don McKenzie as part of the Western Mountain Initiative.

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/publications/fulltext/mckenzie-allen-EOS-WMI.pdf

TWO JOINT FIRE SCIENCE PROGRAM PROJECTS COMPLETED -- Final reports for the projects "Field Training Workshops for Field Demonstrating the Use of the JFSP-Sponsored Photo Series and Fuel Characteristic Classification System" and "Forest Floor Consumption and Smoke Characterization in Boreal Forested Fuelbed Types of Alaska" were submitted to the Joint Fire Science Program. The series of workshops is complete, and the boreal forest consumption equations have been programmed into Consume 3.0.

Workshops – http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/research/outreach/workshops.shtml

Alaska Forest Floor Consumption -- http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/research/smoke/jfsp_boreal_final_report.pdf

GLOBAL FIRE INITATIVE TECHNICAL REPORT PUBLISHED -- “Fire, Ecosystems and People: Threats and Strategies for Global Biodiversity Conservation,” (Technical Report 2007-2) has been published by the Nature Conservancy by a group of authors that included FERA’s Dr. Ernesto Alvarado. It outlines an integrated fire management plan for communities, governments, and allied organizations.

http://www.tncfire.org/documents/Shlisky_and_others.pdf

NEW STUDY CONSIDERS THE BIOMASS OF HANDPILES FOR SMOKE MANAGEMENT PLANNING -- The Joint Fire Science Program has funded Clint Wright to conduct 2 -year study to determine the relationships between handpile composition, size, and biomass in different vegetation types. This will result in improved equations for estimating hand-pile biomass which, in turn, will allow for more accurate smoke production estimates.

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/research/smoke/handpiles.shtml

Journal of Forestry Publishes Article on Managing Forest Structure and Fire Hazard
A discussion of the integration of tools from silviculture and fuel science to quantify fuel treatment options was published in the Journal of Forestry by Morris Johnson, Dr. David L. Peterson, and Crystal Raymond.
http://saf.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/saf/jof/2007/00000105/00000002/art00007

MEASURING FOREST FLOOR REDUCTION FROM FUEL TREATMENTS IN ALASKA'S INTERIOR -- FERA’s field crew, led by Bob Vihnanek, is in Alaska this summer collecting data to characterize the forest floor, and will later measure how much it is reduced from a series of experimental fuel treatments. This is one part of a larger study funded by the Joint Fire Science Program and led by Dr. Scott Rupp of the University of Alaska Fairbanks to consider the effects of fuels reduction treatments on fire behavior and post-fire vegetation dynamics.

http://www.firescience.gov/JFSP_Search_Results_Detail.cfm?project_id=06-2-1-39&fy_funded=2006