Supervisory Ecologist
ilana.l.abrahamson@usda.gov
(406) 329-4831
Ilana Abrahamson
Personal Summary
Ilana Abrahamson leads the Fire Effects Information System (FEIS) team of the Fire Modeling Institute in the Fire, Fuel, and Smoke program of RMRS. FEIS is an online database of research syntheses on species and ecosystems and their relationships with fire. It provides resource specialists and planners with comprehensive assessments about more than 1,100 species and ecosystems. FEIS is searchable by plant community, life form, individual species, and more.
Ilana also manages the FireWorks Educational Program. FireWorks is an educational program about the science of wildland fire, designed for students in grades K-12. It provides students with interactive, hands-on activities to study wildland fire and consists of a curriculum and trunks of materials.
FireWorks has specialized curricula to learn about:
- Fire in the Northern Rocky Mountains and Northern Cascades
- Fire in the Sierra Nevada
- Fire in the Sagebrush Ecosystem
- Fire in the Missouri River Country (from the northern Rocky Mountain Front to the tallgrass prairies)
- How and why the Pikunii (Blackfeet) people carried fire
- Fire in the Cross Timbers ecoregion
Learn More
Selected Publications & Products
Abrahamson, Ilana L. 2014. Fire regimes of Alaskan white spruce communities. In: Fire Effects Information System, [Online]. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory (Producer). Available: http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/fire_regimes/AK_white_spruce/all.html
Abrahamson, Ilana. 2014. Arctostaphylos manzanita. In: Fire Effects Information System, [Online]. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory (Producer). Available: http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/shrub/arcman/all.html
Abrahamson, Ilana L. 2013. Fire regimes in Hawai'ian plant communities. In: Fire Effects Information System, [Online]. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory (Producer). Available: http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/fire_regimes/Hawaii/all.html
Abrahamson, Ilana L.; Nelson, Cara R.; Affleck, David L. R. 2011. Assessing the performance of sampling designs for measuring the abundance of understory plants. Ecological Applications 21: 452–464.