California Fire Portal

The primary goal of this part-time position is to help the TNC LANDFIRE Team advance the mission of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and major partners by organizing and leading TNC internal communication activities. Second, assist the TNC LANDFIRE Team with external communications among partners and collaborators as requested and appropriate.

POSITION PURPOSE: To expose candidates to a wide variety of functions within the Company, to include botany, wildlife, fisheries, timber cruising, forest engineering, sales, timberland services, forestry, and operations.Designed to provide an opportunity to gain an understanding of the processes and roles within Green Diamond at multiple locations within the company.

This survey is intended for organizations that either do not currently have prescribed fire insurance or their current liability coverage is not sufficient.

Positions are being filled under the Pathways Student Internship Authority which is designed to provide students enrolled in a variety of educational institutions, from high school to graduate level, with paid work opportunities in agencies to explore federal careers while in school.

Responsibilities:

• The incumbent of this position performs a variety of clearly defined tasks within one or more functional areas of biological sciences.
• Biological sciences include forestry, rangeland management, wildlife biology, fish biology, ecology, botany, recreation, natural resources management, biological sciences, and other related disciplines.
• Assignments will vary by Agency and setting.
• The major duties include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Develops and applies knowledge of principles, concepts, work processes, and regulations of one or more functional areas of biological science.
• Assists in one or more phases of the research process.
• Performs routine techniques using a variety of specialized equipment.
• Records instrument readings, collects samples, and takes measurements.
• Maintains inventory of chemical and biological materials.
• Maintains work area in a neat and orderly manner
• Forest Service incumbents in wildland fire management may also perform the following:
• Develops and applies knowledge of fuels management and fire suppression techniques.
• Cleans, reconditions, and stores fire tools and equipment.
• Serves as a member of fire crew assigned to suppress wildland fires.
• Reviews detailed procedural instructions and receives in-depth on-the-job and formal classroom training.

The Great Basin Institute (GBI), in cooperation with the US Forest Service (USFS), is recruiting a Forester to work cooperatively with USFS and GBI staff to determine, plan and arrange the resources necessary to complete the Eshom Ecological Restoration Project, Phase 1. The project seeks to improve forest health and wildlife habitat by reducing fuels from drought- and beetle-impacted trees on the Hume Lake Ranger District. Approximately 1,000 acres of forest will be treated over the next two years.

The project is funded by the California legislature through Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds.  The program seeks to minimize the loss of forest carbon from large, intense wildfires while promoting carbon sequestration efforts through biomass utilization. The Mule Deer Foundation and the National Wild Turkey Federation will partner to convert tree material to mulch for use in the agricultural industry.  As part of a larger silvicultural study, the forester will also assist with data collection that will provide the US Forest Service with baseline information to assess ecological restoration measures and changes in forest health over time.

Timeline:

• Anticipated start date: Fall 2019
• 12-month appointment with additional 12 months available pending performance

Compensation:

• Salary: $65,000-$75,000 DOE
• Housing provided at Hume Ranger District at $8.70 daily (for no less than one month at a time), depending on availability
• Fully paid health insurance premiums (medical, dental, vision, prescription); dependent coverage available out-of-pocket
• Paid holidays and personal leave
• Professional training and certifications may be provided as needed

The Great Basin Institute (GBI) expects to have positions available by Spring 2020.

Explore your Public Lands with GBI:

• Spend the season working outside on a forestry, trail, or habitat restoration hand crew
• Support forestry, wildlife, and vegetation monitoring projects in the Sierra Nevada
• Learn and serve in National Parks, Forests, and Wilderness Areas
• Get paid and earn scholarships & college credit
• Work directly with land management agencies

The International Association of Fire Chiefs, National Association of State Foresters, National Fire Protection Association, and USDA Forest Service are now accepting nominations for the 2020 Wildfire Mitigation Awards.    
 
The Wildfire Mitigation Awards (WMA) are the highest national honor one can receive for outstanding work and significant program impact in wildfire preparedness and mitigation.  The three award categories are:

•     National Wildfire Mitigation Award
•     National Mitigation Hero Award
•     Wildfire Mitigation Legacy Award

These awards are designed to recognize outstanding service in wildfire preparedness and safety across a broad spectrum of activities and among a variety of individuals and organizations. By honoring these achievements, the award sponsors also seek to increase public recognition and awareness of the value of wildfire mitigation efforts.

We encourage you to  gather your information to nominate some very deserving folks for these prestigious awards! The recipient does not need to be an IAWF member to receive an award. Awards will be announce and/or presented at one of our upcoming IAWF Conferences in 2020.

If you’ve nominated someone in the past and they were not selected as the recipient, please do not hesitate to re-nominate them. At times we have numerous deserving folks, however, at this time we are only able to select one person per award.

The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) are open through 5 pm MST, December 5, 2019.

The Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) announcement FA-FOA0020-001 has one task statement. Proposals must address one or more of the following topic areas:

• Fuels management and fire behavior
• Changing fire environment
• Emissions and air quality
• Fire effects and post-fire recovery
• Relative impacts of prescribed fire versus wildfire
• Human dimensions of fire

The primary announcement FA-FOA0020-002 has one task statement:

1. Performance of fuel breaks and fuel break systems  

The Regional Fire Science Exchange announcement FA-FOA0020-003 has one task statement focused on leading and executing a regional fire science exchange in the following four regions (see map and supporting information in the FOA):

1. Alaska
2. California
3. Great Basin
4. Pacific Islands

Text of the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) statement:

Climate change has already had significant consequences in the global wildfire reality, affecting citizens as well as the global wildland fire community. Many key issues of importance to the IAWF - including firefighter and civilian safety, fire management expenses, changing weather patterns, natural role of fire, fire regimes and ecosystem succession, as well as the wildland urban interface - all require recognition of the role of climate change.

Globally, we regularly see new reports about the “worst”, “largest”, “most expensive”, and “deadliest” fires and fire seasons. In 2019 and 2018, striking headlines read “Arctic on Fire” (Sweden, Russia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska), and the most expensive and largest fire years were recorded in 2018 in California and British Columbia, respectively, breaking the previous records set in 2017. The Camp Fire (CA, 2018), Attica Greece (2018), Black Saturday Australia (2009), and Portugal (2017) fires were all ranked amongst the top 11 deadliest fires in the last 100 years.

Under current climate change scenarios, fire regimes will change in terms of increases in burned area, severity, fire season length, frequency, and ignitions from lightning. Many parts of the world have already experienced an increase in record breaking temperatures and recurring droughts that have led to shifts in wildland fire. There is already evidence of climate-driven fire regime change in the Northern Hemisphere upper latitudes with fire risk increasing in non-traditional fire-prone countries. The consequences of human actions are here today, not in some distant future, and these are alarming and, most important, escalating.

The IAWF encourages all countries to emphasize increased international fire training and to implement easier cross-border sharing of professional fire management resources for suppression and prescribed fire opportunities. These will lessen the irrationally heavy burden any single country will have to carry to manage extreme fire seasons. Homes and communities must be better planned and built, so they are increasingly fire resistant and more adapted to natural disasters of all types. Health impacts of fires have long-term consequences, not only those that are immediate from the flames but also those from smoke and toxins, and these must be considered when planning and managing for future wildland fires. Wildfires and smoke do not recognize borders. As the global community tries to manage the new wildfire challenges, it is incumbent on everyone to prepare to support international neighbours in protecting lives and communities from fires and their impacts.

IAWF Vice-President Toddi Steelman recently said in Wildfire magazine (August 2019) that “Recent extreme weather events have catalysed public belief in, and concern about, climate change, and boosted public support for government actions to reduce its harmful impacts. This gives us a window of opportunity when conditions are right to make great strides on climate if we are strategic about it.” This window of opportunity requires people having the knowledge and political will to act now. Our global scientific community needs to publicly share knowledge learned about patterns of extreme wildland fire and weather, as well as how climate change is associated with these patterns. Our global fire management community needs to leverage its credibility to share its experiences about how climate change and its role in extreme weather is playing out in their day to day work environments. Connecting extreme weather events to real on-the-ground consequences can help more people understand how climate impacts are affecting us all.

The Western Forest Initiative at Utah State University (http://westernforestinitiative.org) seeks to fill a PhD position funded by the T. W. Daniel endowment. The selected student will work in the Lutz lab on research in the three largest annually-surveyed, spatially-explicit forest plots in western North America, located in Yosemite, California (http://yfdp.org), Wind River, Washington (http://wfdp.org), and Cedar Breaks, Utah (http://ufdp.org). Experimental work can be conducted in the T. W. Daniel Experimental Forest near Logan, Utah.

The successful student can conduct research on a variety of topics, for example; spatial relationships among woody plants, forest community resistance and resilience, forest canopy-snow interactions, fuel dynamics, climate-mediated forest change, plant-soil interactions, carbon sequestration, seedling dynamics, understory-overstory interactions, or mechanisms and consequences of tree mortality. The existing dataset is particularly rich in demographic data, including annual tree mortality by cause. There will be considerable opportunity to interact with students, scientists, and academics affiliated with the Smithsonian Forest Global Earth Observatory (https://forestgeo.si.edu).

The Tingley Lab in Global Change Ecology is joining the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles and seeking creative and motivated PhD students to join the lab in the Fall of 2020. Our research utilizes field and biodiversity data to explore how large-scale anthropogenic drivers of change (e.g., climate change, land-use change, fire regimes) affect geographic distributions and community interactions over short to long timespans, from years to centuries. Most of our research explores these topics using birds as the primary study organism.

Potential research areas include: 1) the impact of climate change on birds through shifts in distributions or phenology; 2) the mechanisms that define range limits; 3) the role of wildfire in structuring biodiversity; 4) statistical modeling of distributions and assemblages; and/or 5) using historical data to understand processes of change. Research projects will have opportunities to draw from extensive existing databases as well as collect new field data at current field sites in temperate mountain systems. Enthusiasm, excellent written and oral communication abilities, and strong quantitative skills are necessary. Backgrounds in ornithology, modeling, and statistics are desired.