This report is the 9th in a series of annual overviews available from the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Ecological Restoration Institute. The goal of this overview is to provide a concise summary of the fire season and to facilitate comparison with past fires and fire seasons.
Presenter: Patrick H Freeborn, PhD, Research Physical Scientist with the USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station Date: December 6, 2022 at 12 MDT Wildfire activity typically subsides sufficiently enough at night to provide firefighters with opportunities to rest and recover. However, nighttime fire operations are not uncommon. Whilst favorable conditions may enable better fire management progress, …
We hosted a single day field trip that made four stops within the 2021 Telegraph Fire perimeter. The Telegraph Fire, human caused and still under investigation, started 1.5 miles southeast of Superior, Arizona on June 4, 2021 and burned 180,757 acres before being fully contained approximately one month later. The fire was primarily carried by …
Date: March 23, 2022 11am AZ/12pm Mountain DaylightPresenters: Stephen D. Fillmore, PhD Student, University of Idaho, Dr. Sarah McCaffrey To improve understanding of the managed wildfire decision-making process on federal lands (USA), we conducted a mixed methods review of the existing literature. The review was published in September, 2021 in the journal Fire. The review …
Date: September 14, 2021 11am AZ/12pm MDTPresenter: Kevin Vogler, Pyrologix LLC, Missoula Montana Land management agencies in the U.S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture can potentially accomplish ecological resource management objectives using unplanned wildfires, but only if such fires do not otherwise threaten to damage valuable resources and assets. Landscape-scale fuel treatments have been proposed …
by M. Lynch and A. Evans. In 2020, wildfire burned 1,068,373 acres in the Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico), which is greater than the average number of acres burned annually in these two states over the previous ten-year period.” Arizona had significantly more wildfire (929,522 acres) than its ten-year average (305,623 acres), while New Mexico …
Presenter: Stephanie Mueller, Northern Arizona UniversityDate: July 29, 2021 11am AZ / 12pm MDT Fire is an essential component in restoring and maintaining a healthy forest. However, historic land use and decades of fire suppression has excluded fire from millions of forested hectares across much of the western United States, including the Grand Canyon National …
Read more “Fire-weather Drivers of Severity and Spread: Example from Grand Canyon”
Presenter: Miguel Villarreal, Western Geographic Science Center, USGSDate: July 20, 2021 11am AZ/12pm MDT In this webinar I will share results of a recent study of contemporary fire regimes over a 32-year period (1985-2017) in the Madrean Sky Islands of the U.S. and México. Our research team evaluated the size, severity and return interval of …
Read more “Transboundary Management & Fire Regimes of Bi-National Sky Islands”
Date: Wednesday February 10, 2021 2:30-4pm Mountain Time This webinar brings together a panel of postfire response experts to reflect on their experiences in addressing community needs during recent large fires. The discussion highlighted important differences in fire and postfire response on federal and non-federal lands, and a consideration of existing tools and policies and …
Wildfires in the southwestern US are getting larger, more frequent, and more severe due to changing climatic conditions like rising temperatures and prolonged drought (Singleton et al. 2018, Mueller et al. 2020). Catastrophic wildfire events directly impact communities, ecosystems, and cultural resources—and can pose continuing hazards long after the fire is extinguished. Flooding and erosion …