What is the Southwest Fire Science Consortium?
The consortium is a way for managers, scientists, and policy makers to more effectively interact and share science. The Southwest is one of the most fire-dominated regions of the US, but limited in terms of organizations focused on fire research and information dissemination. In the Southwest there are many localized efforts to develop scientific information and to disseminate that to practitioners on the ground, but these initiatives are often not well coordinated or aware of all the information and resources that are available. The real need for a consortium is to help bring these parallel efforts together to be more efficient and inclusive.
Guiding Principles:
- Be inclusive, making sure all relevant partners have the opportunity to be involved
- Serve as neutral science partners
- Be customer driven, both in how they are structured and how they function
- Operate collaboratively, fostering joint management and science communication
- Be innovative, pursuing new and creative ways to disseminate knowledge
- Facilitate the flow in fire science
Key Objectives:
- Disseminate information and build relationships between scientists, practitioners, and managers
- List and describe existing research and syntheses
- Develop methods to assess the quality and applicability of research
- Demonstrate research on the ground
- Build place-based adaptive management partnerships that promote adoption of fire science findings by fire, fuel, and land managers
- Develop mechanisms to assess new research, synthesis, or validation needs
Our regional Southwest Fire Science Consortium is built around three key questions:
1 What do people need to know? Information needs can be assessed through workshops, organization of a community of practice of wildland fire professionals and surveys. 2 What information is already known (synthesis of existing science) and how should it be communicated (web, publications, workshops, courses)? 3 What are the key information gaps between what we need to know and what is already known? This question leads to the identification of critical areas for new research and adaptive managementexperiments.
