In a guest post on the US Department of the Interior Office of Wildland Fire Blog, SFE team member David Godwin shared SFE programs and JFSP supported research related to duff fire science and management. Read the post.
Continue ReadingJFSP
Infrastructure Bill Includes $3.3 Billion for Wildland Fire
Wildfire Today covers the $3.3 billion in wildland fire spending authorized in the recently passed infrastructure bill. This includes $20 million for the Joint Fire Science Program, which supports Southern Fire Exchange.
Continue ReadingOak Woodlands & Forests Fire Consortium Newsletter
A new issue (Volume 10, Issue 3) of the Oak Woodlands & Forests Fire Consortium newsletter (IGNIS) is now available.
To view this newsletter, CLICK HERE or find it at their website HERE.
Continue ReadingJob: Outreach Program Coordinator, Northwest Fire Science Consortium
The Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society is seeking a Outreach Program Coordinator. This is a full-time (1.0 FTE), 12-month, professional faculty position.
The coordinator position is established to provide support to the Northwest Fire Science Consortium. The Northwest Fire Science Consortium (NWFSC) works to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science information, knowledge, tools, and expertise through its multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional network. NWFSC connects managers, practitioners, scientists, and local communities and collaboratives working on fire issues across all ecosystem types in Oregon and Washington.
View the full position announcement here.
Continue ReadingInfrastructure Bill & Wildland Fire
A Wildfire Today piece addresses the wildland fire funding included in the infrastructure bill currently being considered in Congress. The bill included $20 million for the Joint Fire Science Program as of last Thursday.
Continue ReadingHouse of Representatives Committee Holds Hearing on Wildland Fire Science
In a hearing Tuesday before the House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee the topic was “The state of federal wildland fire science: examining opportunities for further research and coordination.”
Read a summary from Wildfire Today here.
Continue ReadingNotice of Upcoming JFSP Funding Opportunity Announcements
The interagency Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) intends to request proposals through one or more formal Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOA) beginning approximately July 2021 and remaining open approximately 60 days. The intent of this announcement is to provide an early alert to investigators interested in the topics listed below so that they can begin considering responsive ideas with potential partners and collaborators.
Investigators should recognize that final decisions regarding topic selection will not be made until July and that final topic selection may differ from that posted here. One or more topics could be dropped or added, and the specific focus of individual topics may be altered. Investigators should recognize this uncertainty and not invest substantial time or resources working on proposals until the FOAs and their associated topics are formally posted.
Topics and funding opportunities are as follows:
Primary FOA
A. Social and ecological recovery of communities impacted by wildfire JFSP is interested in proposals that will inform the development or improvement of strategies, tools, and resources used for post-fire community recovery, such that they facilitate recovery efforts that increase the resilience of social-ecological systems to future wildfires.
B. Collaborative development of ecosystem mapping products for fire and fuels management
JFSP is looking for proposals to develop, using a collaborative framework, prototype mapping protocols and products that capture current ecosystem condition, desired condition, and departure from desired condition at spatial and temporal resolutions relevant to fire and fuels management decisions.
GRIN FOA – Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) Award
The JFSP will continue awarding the Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) program for current master and doctoral students in the field of wildland fire and related physical, biological, and social sciences. Proposals must be directly related to the mission and goals of JFSP to be considered, and they must address management- or policy-related questions related to one or more of the following general topic areas: fuels management and fire behavior, emissions and air quality, fire effects and post-fire recovery, relative impacts of prescribed fire versus wildfire, or human dimensions of fire.
Regional Fire Science Exchange FOA
The JFSP is looking to solicit proposals to lead and execute a particular regional fire science exchange for a period of one to three years. This solicitation is seeking individual proposals (i.e., each proposal must be specific to one region) for the following six regions of the FSEN: Southern, Southern Rockies, Southwest, Appalachians, Great Plains and North Atlantic.
New Fire Science Research Funding Opportunity
The Joint Fire Science Program announced this week the potential funding opportunity (FOA) topics for 2020. There are three research topics tentatively selected for 2020 along with the Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) Award. The purpose of providing advance notice of FOA topics is to provide research teams the opportunity to cultivate partnerships for effective science creation and delivery. Excitingly, this year the forecast FOA includes several topics that are particularly relevant to the Southern region. As your proposals come together over the upcoming months, consider reaching out to your local Fire Science Exchange to discuss opportunities for science coproduction and delivery.
The final FOA will be posted in July 2020. Read the full Forecast FOA here: https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=325472.
From Grants.Gov:
Continue ReadingA. Relative impacts of prescribed and wildland fire
Although the documented benefits of prescribed fire are numerous including habitat improvement and hazardous fuel reduction, there are drawbacks as well, such as reductions in air quality, which may impact human health. Prescribed fire is often implemented with the assumption that it will mitigate the effects of uncontrolled wildfire, because prescribed fire has been shown to reduce the intensity of subsequent wildfire under certain conditions. This is desirable because the impacts of wildfire are usually of a higher magnitude, larger in size and intensity, and pose a risk to public safety. To fully evaluate the trade-offs between prescribed fire programs and current wildfire impacts, an assessment framework is vital. Currently, there is little information on the spatial scale, frequency and spatial pattern at which prescribed fire begins to have an impact on subsequent wildfire extent, intensity and severity. As a result, JFSP is interested in proposals that improve our understanding of the relationship between prescribed fire programs and subsequent wildfire characteristics and this information is needed across a variety of vegetation types and regions.
B. Types and distribution of ignitions and their relation to fire size and impacts
One approach to reducing the negative impacts of wildfire to social and ecological values is to reduce the occurrence of human-caused wildfire ignitions with targeted wildfire prevention strategies. Planning and implementing effective fire prevention strategies requires detailed knowledge of the temporal and spatial distribution of different wildfire ignition sources (e.g., arson, accidental, lightning) and factors that influence whether different ignition sources lead to development of large wildfires. As a result, JFSP is interested in proposals that evaluate driving factors for the spatial and temporal distribution of ignitions and the effectiveness of different fire prevention actions as they relate to different human-caused ignitions.
C. Science in support of fuel treatment performance metrics
While it is relatively easy to document changes in fuels conditions following treatments at finer spatial scales, there is currently no objective framework to link fuel conditions to desired outcomes (e.g., reducing fire intensity and severity, improving fire suppression efficacy, reducing resource loss) at the landscape level. Such information is critical for developing cost-effective strategies to address the threats of wildfire. One possible strategy is to consider the evaluation of fuels treatment programs using a risk framework, where the probability and intensity of wildfire is considered in conjunction with valued resources. The development of a risk framework should assist agencies in measuring the extent and duration of risk reduction that could be achieved from a given fuel treatment. As a result, JFSP is interested in proposals that improve our understanding of the impacts of fuels treatments on fire suppression efficiency and protection of valued resources including the development of fuel treatment performance metrics at landscape scales.
GRIN FOA – Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) Award
In partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology, the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) will likely continue the Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) program for current master and doctoral students in the field of wildland fire and related physical, biological, and social sciences. The purpose of these awards is to enhance student exposure to the management and policy relevance of their research. As a result, these awards will enable graduate students to conduct research that will supplement and enhance the quality, scope, or applicability of their thesis or dissertation to develop information and products useful to managers and decision-makers.
Proposals must describe new, unfunded work that extends ongoing or planned research that is the subject of a thesis or dissertation that has been approved by the graduate student’s advisory committee. Proposals must be directly related to the mission and goals of JFSP to be considered, and they must address management- or policy-related questions related to one or more of the following general topic areas: fuels management and fire behavior, emissions and air quality, fire effects and post-fire recovery, relative impacts of prescribed fire versus wildfire, or human dimensions of fire.
