Upcoming Webinar to Help Alaska Fire Managers Plan for an Uncertain Future

Fire seasons are changing, and Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center science is trying to help fire managers prepare.

Jeremy Littell, an AK CASC research ecologist, is presenting on what those changes might look like in a webinar for the Alaska Fire Science Consortium Tuesday, April 21.

Littell will explain how future projections from ALFRESCO fire modeling and the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) may be used to plan for future changes in fire regimes and weather.

The ALFRESCO model was developed by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and AK CASC Institutional Principal Investigator Scott Rupp. ALFRESCO is a boreal landscape model that keeps track of burning land and what vegetation type the land becomes after it burns – then simulates how the landscape might change in the future. The Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System looks at fire weather in boreal forests and how it might progress across a season.

Using ALFRESCO and CFFDRS to anticipate the future can help fire managers hold a mirror up to their lived experiences and help predict what is coming next. The goal of the webinar is to help them understand how they can use the information in both to plan for mid- and long-term future scenarios.

For example, managers can use the information to look at whether fires might get bigger and more frequent in certain areas or to assess whether there are places where management techniques like prescribed burns could be implemented to change fire outcomes. This information can help managers make decisions in the long term that can affect budgets and staffing levels.

Ultimately, Littell hopes fire managers can give feedback on how the science can be more useful for practical applications.

“The goal here is to try to prime the pump, to figure out more about how to better meet their needs,” he said. “That’s our job at the CASC.”

Registration for the webinar is online.