Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modeling Extreme Wildfire Events
Welcome to the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modeling Extreme Wildfire Events repository, part of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab (ESIIL). This repository serves as the central hub for our working group, hosting our project description, proposals, member bios, codebase, and more.
Our Project
Extreme wildfire events are increasing, driven by the expansion of urban communities closer to forests, land management practices which suppressed wildfire, and climate change. These events have a low probability of occurring, but they exhibit exceptional fire behavior characteristics and produce severe consequences for forests and humans. While the media and field studies focus on extreme wildfire events like the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii and the Paradise fire in California, most estimates of wildfire risk report averages, but not extreme events, and they often underestimate the effects of climate change. Our workshops will form a cohesive, interdisciplinary research team to: 1) synthesize our current understanding of extreme fire behavior, 2) isolate the current gaps in our understanding of the social and biophysical drivers that cause extreme wildfire events and risk to communities, 3) develop a roadmap for improving the representation of extreme events into models that represent social and biophysical processes, and 4) integrate a widely-used model of forest change into High Performance Computers to generate improved predictions of wildfire risk and the probability of extreme wildfire events. We will initially investigate extreme fires in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, interior Alaska, and the Southern Appalachians.
Project Proposal
Here, you will find the accepted project proposal, including project goals, timeline and more.
Group Members
- Member 1: Melissa Lucash, PI.
- Member 2: James Lamping, Co-PI and tech lead.
- Member 3: Rob Scheller, Co-PI.
- Member 4: Branda Nowell, Co-PI.
- Member 5: Sam Flake, Co-PI.
Repository Structure
- LANDIS Docker file: Documentation for integrating the LANDIS-II model into Jetstream.
- Documents: Meeting note, photos, references, etc.
- Visualization: Code for creating figures, charts, and interactive visualizations.
Working Group Meeting (Sept 16 - Sept 19, Boulder, CO):
- The goal of this wrokshop was to convene an interdisciplinary meeting with 15 experts in fire science that span the social and biophysical sciences to 1) synthesize our current understanding of extreme fire behavior and their socioeconomic context, 2) isolate the current gaps in our understanding of the social and biophysical markers that contribute to extreme fire behavior and risk to communities, and 3) develop a roadmap for improving the representation of social and biophysical mechanisms in models that drive extreme wildfire behavior. The results of our workshop will be written up into a peer-reviewed publication, co-authored by workshop participants.
Participants: Melissa Lucash, Rob Scheller, Branda Nowell, James Lamping, Amanda Stasiewicz, Matt Hurteau, Jennifer Fawcett, Tirtha Banerjee, Courtney Schultz, Ali Urza, Zachary Robbins, Lise St. Denis, Shelby Weiss, Wesley Rancher, Sean Parks, Cole Buettner
Meeting Notes and Agendas
- Extreme Wildfire Workshop
- Main Meeting Notes
- Breakout groups
Contributing to This Repository
- Contributions from all group members are welcome.
- Please adhere to these guidelines:
- Ensure commits have clear and concise messages.
- Document major changes in the meeting notes.
- Review and merge changes through pull requests for oversight.
Getting Help
- If you encounter any issues or have questions, please refer to the ESIIL Support Page or contact the repository maintainers directly.