Southern Fire Portal

The Department of Interior's (DOI's) Office of Wildland Fire (OWF) and Office of Policy Analysis (PPA) are organizing the DOI Wildland Fire Workshop, to be held online in the fall of 2021. This workshop builds on the momentum of Reclamation's Wildfire Research Needs Workshop (led by John Whitler on April 6 and 7, 2021), and is an opportunity for those interested in issues related to wildland fire at Interior to come together for networking, learning, and discussing current issues.

Call for Presenters

The draft agenda includes "lightning rounds" to allow participants to learn about current work going on at Interior. Lightning-round presentations are brief summaries of in-progress work or completed projects. Please use the survey link below to send a brief description of your research by Friday, April 30.

Call for Session Facilitators

The draft agenda also includes two working sessions, where participants will be breaking into several smaller groups to address various aspects of how wildland fire intersects with (1) climate change, and (2) racial equity and disadvantaged communities. If you would be interested in serving as a chairperson or note-taker for any of these groups, please use the survey link below to let the workshop coordinators know by Friday, April 30.

The Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, in collaboration with the Department of Statistics, the North Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and the USGS Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, will be hiring a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in data science to assist with efforts to develop a prototype early warning system for Prescribed Fire Managers (PFMs). The primary research objective of the successful candidate is to characterize short, medium, and long-term climatological-risk for PFMs in the Southeast US, and to build a framework that allows for optimal decision making under uncertainty.

The successful candidate will work with Drs. Brian Reich (Statistics), Jaime Collazo (Applied Ecology), and Adam Terando (USGS) to model environmental conditions conducive to prescribed burning activities over time scales of days to decades in the future. Three major objectives of the position include 1). Define, identify, and model ‘fail-states’, or the sets of conditions that PFMs wish to avoid 2) Model risk exposure of PFMs given existing numerical model simulations of future climate over near-term (days) to long-term (decades) time scales, and 3) develop spatio-temporal models to characterize extreme wildfire risk on decadal time scales.

The incumbent will also join a national cohort as part of the National and Regional Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Fellows (CAPF) Program. The SE CAPF scholar will collaborate with other cohort scholars from across the country on national-scale research and synthesis on climate-fire issues and participate in regular training and professional development opportunities, including training on translational ecology, co-production of actionable science with natural resource decision-makers, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This is a two (2) year position, contingent on availability of funding, based in the Department of Applied Ecology and the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center at North Carolina State University in close collaboration with the Department of Statistics. The successful candidate will be jointly mentored by Drs. Brian Reich, Adam Terando, and Jaime Collazo.

The Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Oklahoma State University, is seeking qualified individuals to work on a research project funded through the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (South Central-CASC). The research aims to understand the nexus of climate change and prescribed fire risk analysis, tolerance, and communication.