Please join the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, the Southern Rockies Fire Science Network, and partners from the San Juan National Forest and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station for a panel discussion about an evolution in thinking about fire!

In 2023, fire managers on the San Juan National Forest in southern CO and their partners faced many of the same challenges they face every summer; however, this fire season, they chose to react differently. By embracing different ways of thinking about fire and communicating difficult tradeoffs effectively with partners, forest officials improved relationships and aligned support through several large, long duration events. In this 90-minute panel discussion, SJNF fire managers follow up on a just-released documentary video of the same name to reflect on 2023 fire response decisions and discuss how reflexive thinking obscured certain management opportunities. Their experience models ‘an evolution,’ a shift toward more nuanced, risk-informed, and strategic fire response, and it informs ongoing research around fire and risk decisions. This panel discussion provides an opportunity to engage with these managers and learn from their experience and shift toward more nuanced, risk-informed, and strategic fire response.

Prior to joining us on May 16, please watch the full ‘Evolution in Thinking’ video around which this presentation is centered.

What : Panel discussion with fire managers and staff from the San Juan National Forest about shifts in thinking that are changing the way the forest approaching fire management and response.
When : Thursday, May 16, 2:30-4:00 Mountain Time
Where : Zoom; register here
Who : panelists include Josh Peck, Pagosa District Ranger; Pat Seekins, Fuels Program Manager; Tracy Milakovic, Pagosa Fire Management Officer; Lorena Williams, Public Affairs Specialist; Dana Guinn, Southwest Partnership Manager (Forest Stewards Guild)

This webinar is co-hosted by the Arizona Wildfire Initiative. 

Meet at the Vista Grande Community Center in Sandia Park for the morning classroom portion. The field portion will take place at the Milne-Gutierrez Open Space (12 min. SE of Sandia Park).

This workshop is for forest and fire practitioners and interested landowners to learn about creating prescriptions for pile burning, pile construction, PPE, containment, and permitting. The workshop will include both classroom and field components and will introduce attendees to the State's Certified Burn Manager Program.

*NOTE: Lunch will be provided to participants*

AGENDA

10:00 am – CLASSROOM: State burner program, prescriptions, permitting

12:00 pm – FIELD: Pile construction, containment, PPE

2:00 pm – Wrap up

Join FACNM as we discuss New Mexico's new certified burn program and ways to responsibly and safely increase implementation of prescribed fire across jurisdictions and land boundaries in the state! This presentation is open to practitioners, leaders, and members of the public.

Brian Filip, Prescribed Fire Coordinator with NM EMNRD-Forestry Division, will talk about the newly released certified burn program, including its progress, basis in law, and certification. Brian will walk attendees through the steps necessary to become a certified burn manager along with some of the benefits of going through the program. Sam Berry, Southwest Associate Director with Forest Stewards Guild, will give a refresher on the All Hands All Lands burn team, a collaborative group of fire-qualified professionals who add capacity where needed to ensure that prescribed burns can be carried out safely and effectively. Presenters: Brian Filip, Prescribed Fire Coordinator with NM EMNRD-Forestry Division; Sam Berry, Southwest Associate Director with Forest Stewards Guild.

When: Thursday, December 7 from 2:00-3:00pm MT
Where: Zoom (registration required) or Facebook Live
Who: Presenters Brian Filip, Prescribed Fire Coordinator with NM EMNRD-Forestry Division, and Sam Berry, Southwest Associate Director with Forest Stewards Guild

In this webinar from the Fire Adapted New Mexico learning network, presenter Dr. Thomas Swetnam discusses the long view on fire, forests, and people in the Southwest through the lens of tree rings (dendrochronology) and archaeology.

People have lived within forest landscapes of the Jemez Mountains for centuries. Droughts and wildfires have recurred many times, but ancestral Pueblo populations managed to live within these forests, with no known history of catastrophic fires destroying their villages. In recent decades, however, very large and high intensity wildfires are burning over these landscapes and the ruins of ancestral villages, as well as in modern housing developments. How did Puebloan people live within fire-prone landscapes at relatively high population densities for centuries in what was essentially a sustainable human-natural system? Researchers have attempted to answer this question over the past decade with an inter-disciplinary research team of tree-ring scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists, ecological modelers, education and outreach specialists.

In this presentation, Dr. Swetnam will focus on findings from tree-ring studies of fire, climate and forest dynamics, along with archaeological research aimed at reconstructing human population changes over the past 400 years. Although the past is not a perfect guide for the future, the history of people, forests and fires in the Jemez Mountains provides useful insights for restoring and living within resilient forest landscapes today.

View the webinar by registering through Zoom or by joining through Facebook Live on November 14 at 12:00pm.

This webinar is part of FACNM’s fall webinar series all about different aspects of prescribed fire. Click on the flyer to learn more about all presentations in the series, including the last one on December 7! Click here to view a recording of the first webinar in the series which happened on October 11.

In this webinar co-hosted by FACNM and the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, Dr. Makoto Kelp discusses how catastrophic wildfires in the western United States pose significant risks to public health, infrastructure, and ecosystems.

As these wildfires become more frequent, there is a growing need for a common methodology to identify suitable locations for prescribed burning aimed at mitigating future wildfire impacts to affected populations and ecosystems. This presentation explores the use of atmospheric chemistry transport modeling, satellite observations, and data from land managers to assess the effectiveness of prescribed burning interventions in reducing potential future wildfire smoke exposure. The presenter offers lessons for states and rural environmental justice communities through a discussion on how implementing preventative prescribed burns in heavily forested areas such as Northern California and the Pacific Northwest may yield substantial net benefits for air quality across the entire western US, while similar interventions in other states would result in comparatively smaller impacts. This presentation is based on a recent publication of the same name: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003468.

View the recording on the FACNM Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/fireadaptednewmexico/
View the recording on the SWFSC YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@swfirescience/videos

On Thursday, May 11th, Jacob Pederson with NM Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department – Forestry Division will join FAC NM to discuss the role of Forestry Division before, during, and after fire.

To hear about the Prescribed Fire Act and certified burner training, Community Wildfire Defense Grant (CWDG) summer proposal preparation, and how the Forestry Division is innovating, leading, and staying involved with fire preparedness and recovery efforts, please register below or join us on Facebook Live. This webinar is presented in concert with EMNRD.

When: 11 May at 3:00pm MDT
Where: Zoom, FACNM Facebook Live, and EMNRD Facebook Live
Who: NM Forestry Division and FACNM

Where there is fire there is smoke, and where there is smoke there are potential impacts on air quality!

How do we know when, where, and for how long our communities are likely to be exposed?

In this one-hour presentation, Air Quality Specialist Kerry Jones will discuss various facets of smoke projections, including what goes into generating seasonal outlooks and fire weather forecasts, the weather conditions that are most conducive to fire and to smoke, and how determinations of air quality are made along with the decision to send air quality advisory alerts out to the public.

Please join us to learn about the operational side of smoke forecasting, followed by a facilitated Q&A session where attendees may pose their questions to the presenter.

When: Thursday, March 16th from 2-3pm MT
Where: Zoom and FACNM Facebook Live
Who: Kerry Jones, USFS Air Quality Specialist

Additional upcoming events on smoke readiness

March 22 at 2pm: Smoke Resources Learning Exchange
FAC NM bi-monthly leaders call on Smoke Resources. FAC NM facilitators and leaders will discuss smoke impacts on community health and review resources for equitable smoke preparedness. To join the conversation, consider becoming a FAC NM Leader.

March 21 at 12pm: Strategies to reduce wildfire smoke in frequently impacted communities
The SW and NW Fire Science Consortiums and Forest Stewards Guild present a one-hour webinar with USFS speaker Rick Graw on proactive and adaptive land management strategies to reduce wildfire smoke in frequently impacted communities. This webinar focuses on research from the Pacific Northwest but is applicable to land managers and fire adapted communities practitioners everywhere.

Coalitions and Collaboratives, Inc. (COCO) and the USDA Forest Service invite you to join the community disaster mitigation conversation on March 3rd!

When: Friday, March 3, 2023 from 9-10am MST
Where: Virtual - GoTo Meeting
What: Introduction to CMAT
How: Register by clicking the button below or by visiting https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8105599049674114906

Come learn from a team of experts about the Community Mitigation Assistance Team (CMAT) national interagency resource, how it can benefit your community, and how to access its resources. The CMATs are available to help your community develop and implement strategic plans, build partnerships, and provide training to enhance wildfire mitigation and preparedness.

CMATs are designed to help communities build sustainable local capacity for community wildfire mitigation during high-risk times when awareness for risk reduction and likelihood of action is the highest. With the increasing threat of wildfire across the Southwest, it is essential that communities take proactive steps to mitigate risk and build resilience. By partnering with the CMATs, you can take advantage of the support and resources to realize a more fire adapted future.

To learn more about the program, please visit https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/cmat.

The team hopes to see you on March 3rd and looks forward to working with you to protect our communities from wildfire.

Hello FAC NM readers!

On January 18, 2023, FAC NM will host an interactive webinar on the network’s revitalized membership structure and improved tools, resources, and facilitation for peer-to-peer knowledge exchange.

Join us for this community-based presentation where Gabe Kohler of the Forest Stewards Guild will discuss:

• new levels of involvement in the learning network,

• upcoming workshops and grants available to members, and

• future plans for network growth and other continual learning opportunities.

When: Wednesday, January 18 at 2:00pm Mountain Time
Where: Zoom and FAC NM Facebook Live
What: An interactive webinar with FAC NM and the Forest Stewards Guild

The Southwest Fire Science Consortium (SWFSC) is hosting researcher Dr. Kelly Jones for a webinar presentation titled
“Denver Water and US Forest Service spent over $60 million to protect Denver’s water supply. Did it work?”

Who: Dr. Kelly Jones, Associate Professor of Ecological Economics with Colorado State University, Human Dimensions of Natural Resources

When: Wednesday, June 22, 2022 at 11am AZ / 12pm MDT

Where: virtual webinar via Zoom

What: Collaboratively-funded fuel treatments are becoming more common in the western U.S. to proactively address wildfire impacts. Water utilities often play an important role in these collaborations and are motivated by the significant impact that wildfire has on source water protection. In this webinar, Dr. Jones will present research which provides insight on how the economic returns from proactive wildfire mitigation could be improved. She and her team produced an economic assessment of Denver’s Forests to Faucets partnership, a collaboration which invested >$60 million in wildfire mitigation projects between 2011 and 2019. The research, combining wildfire modeling, sediment modeling, and primary and secondary data on economic values, quantified the impact of the actual investments on multiple values at risk. Large benefits to source water protection and other values at risk resulted from these proactive investments but the benefits only exceed the costs of funding wildfire mitigation under certain conditions.

This webinar is intended for an audience of practitioners, land managers, researchers, and others with a vested interest in fire science, natural resource management, water protections, and the wildland-urban interface.

The Presentation

Are you curious about how land managers plan for wildfire risk in their forest treatments or how fire managers figure out how to respond when a wildfire is actively burning? If so, please join us for a 60-minute webinar where speakers Kit O’Connor and Tyler Beeton will discuss a powerful mapping and pre-planning tool called Potential Operational Delineations, or PODs. PODs incorporates a risk management approach, local knowledge of the land, and existing barriers to fire to develop logical landscape-scale wildfire response options before fires spark. Register now to learn about how this tool is being used to plan for forest treatments and wildfire response across the landscape. You can attend the webinar via Zoom, or tune in on the FACNM Facebook Live page.

The Speakers

Kit O’Connor, Research Ecologist, USDA Rocky Mountain Research Station - Human Dimensions Program: Wildfire Risk Management Science Team
Kit’s primary research interest is in bridging the human and ecosystem dimensions of fire management; including the use of pre-fire planning and operational decision support analytics to promote ecosystem restoration and resilience, safe and effective suppression response, and sustainable forest and fire management systems. Kit is an analytics lead for the National Risk Management Assistance Program for large wildfire management and a core member of the PODs strategic fire planning team. The team is currently working with more than 60 national forests, three states and, numerous other public and private land managers to develop and implement sustainable fire management plans. Originally from Edmonds, WA, Kit has a B.S. in Entomology from Penn State University, M.S. in Biology from The University of Quebec at Montreal, and a Ph.D. in Natural Resource Management from The University of Arizona. He is recipient of the 2019 RMRS Science Delivery Award and 2020 forest Service Deputy Chief’s Award for Science Delivery. Kit lives in Missoula, Montana where he enjoys trail running, mountain biking, and family campouts with his wife, daughters, and three dogs.

More on Kit’s research and work can be found here.

Tyler Beeton, Research Associate III, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute (CFRI)
Tyler is a collaborative decision-support program manager, which includes managing, contributing to, and evaluating collaborative adaptive management processes with project partners and stakeholders. He leads social science assessments of landscape-scale collaborative forestry projects, coordinates and facilitates Potential Operational Delineation (PODs) workshops and evaluates how PODs and Risk Management Assistance products are used in incident and non-incident management contexts. Tyler holds an M.A. in anthropology, and he is working toward a PhD in Ecology and Human-Environment Interactions at Colorado State University.

More on Tyler’s research can be found here.

Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) was co-developed by the Rocky Mountain Research Station Wildfire Risk Management Science (WRMS) Team to pre-plan for fire and to give land managers a formal process for developing landscape-scale wildfire response options before fires start. PODs are spatial units or containers defined by potential control features, such as roads and ridge tops, within which relevant information on forest conditions, ecology, and fire potential can be summarized.

The Presentation

Join us as we celebrate National Wildfire Preparedness Day by discussing advances in home wildfire risk assessments! In this 60-minute webinar, Chris Barth and James Meldrum from the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team will speak about their recent publication on parcel-level risk. Their presentation will focus on the paired rapid assessment/household survey approach that the WiRē team has employed with partners and communities across the West. They will also discuss the effect home hazard assessments have on reducing the risk of property destruction and the importance of community-level risk reduction to address risk-spillovers across neighboring properties. Log on to learn more about reducing home hazard risk at the community level! Register now to attend the webinar via Zoom or tune in on the FACNM Facebook Live page.

The Speakers

Chris Barth, Fire Mitigation Specialist, BLM-Montana/Dakotas Fire & Aviation Management
Chris works with the public, internal and external partners, elected officials, and the media to communicate fire management strategies and disaster response, planning, and fire adaptation concepts. Chris has received several national awards for his work to reduce community wildfire risk. He is a founding member and subject matter expert for the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team - with research interests in homeowners’ attitudes towards wildfire mitigation and public perception of wildfire risk. He has co-authored papers on homeowners’ attitudes towards wildfire mitigation and public perception of wildfire risk. He has also presented at national and international conferences related to his work in this field.

Chris has worked in fire management for more than 30 years. He is a Public Information Officer (PIO) on a Type 1 incident management. As a PIO, Chris’ communication style is shaped by his operational, professional, and research experiences. 

More on Chris’ research can be found here.

James Meldrum, Research Economist, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
James Meldrum is an applied research economist with the USGS’s Social and Economic Analysis branch in Fort Collins, CO. James is a founding member of the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team, a long-standing collaboration between wildfire risk mitigation practitioners and social science researchers. Through more than 10 years of this partnership, he has published numerous journal articles on mitigating the risks of wildland fire. In addition to his work with the WiRē Team, James investigates the effects of natural resource decisions on people in numerous contexts, including fuels and fire management, ecosystem restoration, electricity generation, and the management of invasive species.

More on James’ research can be found here.

The Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team brings diverse expertise in economics, sociology, and wildfire risk mitigation to a multiyear research project on homeowner wildfire risk mitigation and community wildfire adaptedness.

You’re invited to join the Forest Stewards Guild as a prescribed burn observer!

UPDATE: due to unfavorable weather conditions, this burn has been postponed until the autumn. Thank you to all of those who expressed interest in joining us, and please keep an eye on this events webpage for future burn observer opportunities!

Join us for a guided field tour of a prescribed broadcast burn and restoration work being carried out on private-owned land within the Zuni Mountains landscape. Forestry and fire practitioners will respond to your questions and share information about how the burn is being implemented, what we hope to accomplish, and the implications for resilience in the forested landscape. You may access a news release with additional details on the burn here.

If you have an interest in forest health, wildfire risk mitigation, ongoing restoration efforts, or are curious about what goes into a prescribed burn but lack the necessary fire training to be involved first-hand, please consider attending! Observers will be escorted on the burn by qualified personnel. Members of the public are welcome and encouraged to register below.

DATE: tentatively April 7-8 (weather-dependent and subject to change)

SAFETY: Participants will be provided with appropriate personal protective equipment to safely visit the burn site.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST

Join us March 31st, at 2pm MDT for an informational webinar to get your home ready for the 2022 fire season.

In this 60 minute webinar, Megan Fitzgerald-McGowan of the National Fire Protection Association will show you how to prepare your home for fire season. Research has shown that there are simple and easy actions you can take in the areas closest to your home to drastically lessen the chances of it catching fire in a wildfire. Tune-in to learn about the Home Ignition Zones and find out what you can do! Register now to attend the webinar via Zoom, or tune in on the FACNM Facebook live page.

Registration for the class is now closed.

JOIN THE FOREST STEWARDS GUILD!

BASIC FIREFIGHTER TRAINING (S-130) BEING OFFERED AT GLORIETA ADVENTURE CAMPS

UPDATE: registration for S-130 field course being offered on 3/9/22 is currently full. Please follow the link above to register for our S-130 waitlist and we will contact you when another course is scheduled.

The Forest Stewards Guild, in cooperation with Glorieta Adventure Camps, is offering the required field-component of S-130, Basic Firefighter Training. The intent of S-130 is to train new firefighters in basic firefighting skills. The field component may be arduous in nature.

Participants will need to complete 25+ hours of online coursework prior to the event.

S-130 is part of the suite of classes required for basic wildland firefighters. The classroom portion of S-130, as well as all other classes required for basic wildland firefighter training, are available online. S-190, Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior is a prerequisite and must be successfully completed prior to taking S-130.

S-130 Firefighter Training (Field Course)

This course is hands on training providing entry-level firefighting skills. Students will be taken to the field for a day of instruction covering:

• safety orientation

• firefighter preparedness

• tools and equipment

• firing devices

• use of water

• suppression

• securing the control line

• operating safely.

Registration is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Sam Berry at sam@forestguild.org