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Webinar Recordings
To watch a recording of a CFSC webinar, click on its title to open the webinar screen in a new window. Recordings of webinars will be posted here 1-2 days after they occur.
Mixed Conifer Fuels Treatment Practices Guide for Mixed Conifer Forests
Date: June 29th, 2011
Presenter: Alexander Evans, Research Director, Forest Guild
Description:
Click to download the report
Dr. Zander Evans, the Research Director of the Forest Guild, presents on his Joint Fire Sciences Program-funded report on fuels treatment practices. The report focuses on the mixed conifer ecosystems of California, the central and southern Rockies, and the Southwest. The first half of his presentation reviews the historic conditions, past land use, natural fire regimes, impacts of altered fire regimes, and future prospects (given climate change) of mixed conifer forests. The second half of the presentation addresses fuels treatment objectives, techniques, barriers, and successes across a range of ownerships, and draws on the experiences of 75 interviewed managers and experts who work in mixed conferecosystems.
A holistic framework to sustainably manage the wildland-urban interface
A slide from the webinarDate: June 29th, 2011
Presenter: Chris Dicus, California Polytechnic University
Description:
Chris Dicus provides an introduction to the common problems encountered in managing WUI landscapes, and provides a framework for how to address some of these problems.
*(Note: To skip over the "technical difficulties" we experienced during the webinar, you can gloss over minute 2 to minute 11 of the webinar. The webinar ends at 1 hour and 11 minutes, although the recording continues to show the final slide after that.)
Material and Design Considerations for Building in Wildfire Prone Areas
Date: October 5th, 2011
Decking performance slide from webinar
Presenter: Steve Quarles, Institute for Business and Home Safety
Description:
Home survival in wildfire prone areas depends on a combination of adequate vegetation management in the area surrounding your home (i.e., your “defensible space”) and choices regarding building materials and design decisions for the home or building. Steve Quarles has been actively involved in wildfire research and education regarding the performance of materials and building design issues. These issues will be the focus of this one hour webinar. Information provided during this webinar will be applicable to both new construction and retrofitting existing homes or buildings.
Date: October 6th, 2011
Presenter: Brandon M. Collins, US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station
Description:
Brandon Collins examines the effectiveness of planned and completed on-the-ground fuel treatments at reducing extreme fire behavior at multiple sites in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Collins also covers some of the limitations and common difficulties encountered modeling fires at the landscape scale.
Date: October 20th, 2011
Presenter: Scott Stephens, Professor of Fire Sciences, UC Berkeley
Description:
Scott Stephens synthesizes his findings and experiences from his ten years of experience conducting research in the jeffrey pine-dominated mixed conifer forests of Sierra San Pedro Martir. These forests, which did not experience fire suppression until 1970, exhibit a startling amount of resiliency to fire, drought, and other disturbance events. In this webinar, Professor Stephens describes the characterictics of this unique forest and examines the factors which make it so resilient.
Date: October 27th, 2011
Presenter: Malcolm North, US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences
Description:
Malcolm North covers the background and motivation for creating the USFS General Technical Report 220 before explaining the justifications and applications of the treatment guidelines included in the report.
Using the California Fire Return Interval Departure (FRID) map metadata: An introduction and demonstration, including challenges to determining reasonable baseline conditions
Date: November 10th, 2011
Presenter: Hugh Safford, Regional Ecologist, US Forest Service, Region 5
Description:
A detailed walkthrough of how to use and interpret the Fire Return Interval Departure GIS layers.
Description of purpose, data sources, database fields, and their calculations for the California Fire Return Interval Departure (FRID) map metadata (PDF)
US Forest Service Region 5 GIS Clearinghouse
Assessing Hazard and Risk in the Interface: Cautions and Confessions from a Statewide Mapping Effort
Date: November 29th, 2011
Presenter: Dave Sapsis, CALFIRE Fire and Resource Assessment Program
Description:
This webinar will focus on elements required for statewide or regional scale mapping efforts designed to describe and classify ignition exposure to buildings that are associated with wildland (vegetation) fires, and their potential spread into urbanized areas. In addition to covering input data and spatial processing rules, the talk will also address methods of local review and validation, as well fundamental challenges of modeling key mechanisms such as ember production and transport, and the influence of data scale on map precision and accuracy. Finally, the talk will address ongoing concerns over long‐term updates and maintenance.
Planning to Live with Fire: Designing & Retrofitting Communities with Fire in Mind
Date: January 26th, 2012
Presenter: Carol Rice, Wildland Resource Management Inc.
Description:
Carol Rice, coauthor of the book “Managing Fire in the Urban Wildland Interface,” discusses appropriate land use policy, community layout, infrastructure, building requirements, and vegetation management in the WUI. This webinar is targeted for local planners, resource managers, property owners, homeowner associations, developers, and fire authorities. Considerations for existing and new communities are addressed, along with individual lot-by-lot development. Case studies are used to illustrate the process of planning to live with fire.
WUI Fire: Managing the Response
Date: February 23rd, 2012
Presenter: Dan Turner, Urban Forest Ecosystem Institute, Cal Poly
Description:
In this webinar Dan Turner discusses fire jurisdictions, mutual aid agreements, pre-attack planning, deployment and mobilization plans, agency differences in strategy and tactics, resource prioritization, evacuations and Emergency Operations Center (EOC) coordination. It is geared toward public and private sector individuals involved in all facets of WUI fire response.
Date: March 14th, 2012
Presenter: Bob Roper, Ventura County CA Fire Chief representing the IAFC Wildland Fire Policy Committee
Description:
This webinar will give you the basic history of the READY, SET, GO! (RSG) and how the program is rapidly being adopted across the United States. RSG provides concepts to build fire adapted communities and then how to leverage these tenets for your personal safety and the survivability of your structure. Chief Roper will provide you links to get the free RSG information and offer resources to help you implement the program.
Fire in Shrublands - Operational Considerations of Fire Behavior
Date: April 4th, 2012
Presenter: David Weise, US Forest Service, PSW Fire and Fuels Program
Description:
Although fire behavior in shrublands is a key consideration in California, there has been limited focus on this topic in recent years. In this webinar David Weise summarizes the existing published information available for operational use and presents current research results from the past decade designed to improve the ability to predict low intensity fire behavior in these fuel types.
Social Motivation in the WUI: Ways to Effectively Engage the Public
Date: April 24th, 2012
Presenter: Sarah McCaffrey, USDA Forest Service, Research Forester, Social Science Unit
Description:
This webinar provides an overview of what has been learned to date in relation to different aspects of public response to wildfire management including risk perception, social acceptance of prescribed fire and thinning, what makes homeowners more or less willing to create defensible space, and communication dynamics. Developing an accurate understanding of public views of fire management is important in designing policy and outreach that effectively engages the public and ensures that resources are targeted at the issues that are of actual rather than perceived public concern. One barrier to effectively engaging the public may be that many of the accepted descriptions related to the public and wildfire are based primarily on conventional wisdoms that may or may not hold.
Date: April 25th, 2012
Presenter: John Keane, USDA Forest Service, PSW Research Ecologist, Terrestrial Ecology Program
Description:
John Keane presents on his recent research investigating the effects of fuels treatments and wildfires on California spotted owls and their habitat. This research has been focused on assessing spotted owl responses as part of the Plumas-Lassen Study to monitor the effects of fuels treatments implemented under the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Act in the northern Sierra Nevada.
Date: May 9th, 2012
Presenter: Kip van de Water, USDA Forest Service, Fire Ecologist, Plumas National Forest
Description:
Fire history, stand structure, and fuel loads in adjacent riparian and upland forests were measured in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades. Historic stand structure and fuel loads were then reconstructed using fire history and current stand data. Current and reconstructed riparian and upland forests were compared to determine if current conditions differ from historical conditions, and whether differential change has occurred in riparian vs. upland stands.
Date: May 16th, 2012
Presenter: Hugh Safford, USDA Forest Service, Regional Ecologist, Pacific Southwest Region
Description:
Current and projected future trends in fire activity and climate suggest that fire frequency and area burned will increase in most of the world's Mediterranean-climate regions. A major focus of fire protection must be ante facto reduction of combustible fuels, but a major concern is the environmental and ecological impacts of such work. A general fire regime framework can be a useful lens through which to view the relationship between fuel reduction and ecological impact. Fuel reduction work in ecosystems typified by fire regimes characterized by frequent, low or moderate severity fires (e.g. yellow pine, mixed conifer) can be readily accomplished in a restorative framework. On the other hand, fuel reduction in ecosystems supporting "climate- or ignition-limited" fire regimes characterized by less frequent, high severity fires (chaparral, serotinous conifers, wet subalpine forests) is more likely to produce outcomes that are ecologically undesirable. In both fire regime types, successful integration of fuel reduction and ecological restoration requires a marriage between science and application, and strong collaborative
frameworks that integrate public and private concerns, and ecological, social, and economic perspectives.
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