The Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory has been hosting an annual seminar series since 1998. Hour-long seminars are presented by Fire Lab employees and other researchers from throughout the world. Seminars cover current research and management about the natural world from a broad range of disciplines, but most seminars usually have a wildland fire theme. The Fire Lab Seminar Series provides a platform for researchers and managers to present their work in an environment that encourages critical thought, the free exchange of ideas, and knowledge discovery.
Seminars are offered each Thursday, October to May, from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm (Mountain time) via the online web application Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in using this service, please use the below information. Please note, this presentation will be set for listen mode only. At the end of each presentation, a Q&A session will be held via the Chat Box. Please sign up for the Seminar News for notifications and details for the seminars.
Erin Noonan-Wright, RMRS Fire Management Specialist
Federal land managers in the US are charged with risk-based decision-making which requires them to know the risk and to direct resources accordingly. Without understanding the specific factors that produce risk, it is difficult to identify…
Bob Burgan, retired USFS Research Forester; Haiganoush Preisler, retired USFS PSWRS Mathematical Statistician; Christopher Woody, Physical Scientist
Revised Fire Potential Index and Large Fire Probability Maps Based on Satellite and Surface Observations Including Wind
USGS EROS, in conjunction with the USFS-PSW and USFS-RMRS developed new methods for forecasting and displaying the probability of…
Dr. Kenton Gregory, Director OHSU Center for Regenerative Medicine
Research and technology development assessing the immediate and direct effect of wildfire smoke on the lungs of firefighters in the field using a new hand held, quick touch ultrasound that can give immediate point of care assessment of potential…
Karin Riley, RMRS Research Ecologist and Isaac Grenfell, RMRS Mathematician
We used a random forests machine learning process to produce a tree-level model of the US by assigning forest plot data from Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) to landscape data from LANDFIRE at 30x30 resolution. The resulting dataset has numerous…
Chris Armatas, USDA FS Research Social Scientist and Lee Cerveny, USDA FS Research Social Scientist
The Mapping, Prioritization, and Public Participation (M3P) tool: Considering Wildfire Planning, Management, and Restoration
In recent years, catastrophic wildfire has transformed ecosystems and displaced human communities in the western United…
The Wildfire Crisis Strategy: How it started, how it’s going, and how RMRS science contributes
In 2022, the Forest Service released a report titled “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in…
Alan Ager, Retired RMRS Research Forester and Michelle Day, Research Assistant, RMRS
In 2022, the US Forest Service launched an ambitious 10-year strategy to address the escalating wildfire danger in the USA. “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests”…
Mark Finney, RMRS Research Forester and Karen Short, RMRS Research Ecologist
Wildfire analytics now used in the wildfire crisis strategy had beginnings in fire simulation research in the early 1990s. Data and models developed during this period enabled spatial analyses of fire growth and behavior and allowed examination of…
The USFS 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy lays out ambitions goals for increasing the pace and scale of hazardous fuel treatments to reduce risk to communities, but does little to tie these goals to measurable risk reduction outcomes or to…
A Strategic Framework for Planning, Mitigation and Response: PODs, RMA, and Incident Strategic Alignment
Over the last several years scientists and analysts at RMRS Wildfire Risk Management Science (WRMS) team led the development of the PODs…
Minding the Science-Practice Gap in the Wildfire Crisis Strategy: Building Capacity for the Co-Management of Wildfire Risk Transmission (CoMFRT)
A critical challenge to implementing the Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) -- and the Bipartisan…
Transforming data into useful information for wildfire decision-making: improving the utility of remote sensing products at tactical and planning scales
Big data and the knowledge we glean from it are fundamentally changing the way in which resource…
Much of the current dialogue around mitigating wildfire risk to people and property in the United States focuses on vegetation treatments to reduce fuel loads on public lands. There is good reason for that – responsible management of lands within…
Hannah Brenkert-Smith, University of Colorado at Boulder; and James Meldrum, USGS
This seminar builds of the March 9, 2023 “Community-focused programs, datasets, and planning resources for wildfire risk mitigation” seminar (presenters: Greg Dillon, Eva Karau, Kelly Pohl) by focusing on how to support creation of fire-resilient…
In this talk I will explore themes of slack and scarcity and how they relate to efficiency and risk in wildfire. First I will discuss slack and scarcity in the context of incident response and then scale up to the interagency system that prioritizes…
In subalpine forests of the Northern Rockies, short-interval high-severity wildland fires are symptomatic of emerging changes in fire regimes. Evidence of forest conversion to non-forest and prolonged establishment windows is accumulating. However,…