Images and news of wildfires and smoke-filled skies are becoming a common occurrence in the news and on social media. Why is this happening? What can we do to stop this dangerous trend? In the second episode of our Threats to Nature series, we cover these questions and more, investigating the history of fire mitigation as well as emerging tools brought about by research and technological innovation. To cover this information, we welcome two speakers: Dr. Toddi Steelman, the Stanback Dean at the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University, and Dr. Jason Schatz, a Data Scientist manager at Descartes Labs.
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Hosts/Reporters: Valerie Tsao, Jessie Goldblatt
Writers/Producers: Valerie Tsao, Jessie Goldblatt, Aimi Wen
Guests: Dr. Toddi Steelman, Dr. Jason Schatz
Audio Editor: Aimi Wen
TRANSCRIPT:
The struggle to save the world's largest rainforest. The Amazon wildfires moving with blinding speed industrial practices are having a devastating impact and severely depleting fish populations. Our pollution climate presents our threats to nature CEOs.
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Operation climate. Today we will be discussing a very striking threat to nature wildfires. As many of you all know, wildfires have been increasing rapidly all over the world, particularly in the American West and Australia. Millions of people and billions of animal species have been negatively affected by these events. While there are many fire dependent ecosystems, fires have been occurring at such high frequencies and intensities that they've resulted in threats to biodiversity and in the natural environment. Today, we are welcoming to guests who are working hard and the fire mitigation and prevention space. To start us off we have Dr. toddy Steelman, the first permanent Executive Director and Dean at the School of Environment and Sustainability at Duke University and best known as a wildfire expert who has spoken to various organizations around the world, from the UK to Australia to Germany. Her work focuses on fighting and preventing wildfires. As the current president for the International Association for wildland fire, she's able to oversee a community dedicated to wildland fire research. One of the important things that she touches upon is collaboration and learning from each other.
The association is, you know, a place that sort of brings together the community of of interested folks in wildland fire research, practice management,
nonprofit organizations, and you know, so the entire community across the globe that's interested in wildland fire, basically, how do we find a more sustainable paradigm associated with wildland fire? That's, that's part of our mission. We have conferences and workshops where we bring everybody our global community together, so that we can learn from each other. Second thing we do is try to build partnerships. So we are actively building partnerships with all of those member countries. So that we have strong connections to the practitioners, managers, and scientists and researchers that are in those respective countries building sort of those global partnerships with other member organizations in those countries. And then the last part is how do we create a larger sense of belonging among the wildland fire community because we are all dispersed across the world, the northern hemisphere tends to fight wildfire, in what we would consider our summer months in North America and in the southern hemisphere, Australia, South Africa.
Latin America, fights wildfire in what we consider our winter. And so there's a sort of interesting reversal of seasons. And so we're not always on the same page. But we do try to create a sense of community and fellowship and partnership as part of that sense of belonging within the association.
Wow, that's very cool. I didn't realize how much collaboration is happening in the firefighting and fire mitigation space. Yeah. And it's not just sharing knowledge. Dr. Steelman brings up how there's also an exchange of resources and personnel. For example, the fire seasons of the US and Australia are opposite from each other, which means that Australia can send over resources and personnel during the US as far as he's in and vice versa. She also talks about how we can learn not just from each other's current practices, but also practices in our pasts, particularly those of indigenous groups, obviously, the US and many countries around the world have conflicting histories surrounding indigenous peoples. A prime example of this is that historically, Native Americans have been restrained from practicing traditional land management, including cultural burning practices, cultural burning practices. How does that work? Basically, this involves prescribing controlled intentional burns in order to create breaks in the land, which wildfires can't cross since the vegetation has already been burned. These practices help reduce the impacts of wildfires and even have other benefits, such as removing invasive plants, cutting off debris, and recycling nutrients back into the soil. Dr. Stillman is quick to bring up how the US is wrong for preventing these forms of prescribed fires. She explains how governments can learn from these groups and praises Aboriginals, the indigenous people of Australia for their land burning practices.
Another interesting thing about Australia Australia has a really much longer history of Aboriginal burning
You know, Prescribed fire is a really important part of reintroducing fire, naturally into ecosystems that have basically a lot of natural systems basically need fire as part of being a healthy ecosystem. And one of the things we've done in the United States is to really take fire out of a lot of our systems, because we've had a history of suppression basically since 19, since the early 1900s, of putting all of our fires out. But the tradition of prescribed fire has been something that among indigenous communities, and particularly the Aboriginal communities in Australia has been very prevalent, because I think there's been an understanding that you need the fire on the landscape in order for the ecosystem to be healthy. And so in Australia, that tradition has been alive and well, for 1000s of years. And in many ways, the practitioners, especially in Northern Australia, have been vital in not only reinvigorating some of the practices elsewhere in the world, but also just sort of being leaders to show us how we can continue to do that. And I think that's a really exciting part of you know, big swathes of Northern Australian, particularly northern territories get burned every year by the Aboriginal peoples there.
We what fighting fire with fire? Yeah, the point is that we need to prevent buildup of flammable materials that would cause the out of control fires we see in the news. One of the best ways to do that is to have controlled fires that are smaller, in addition to the indigenous communities. Dr. Stillman also talks about other key stakeholders involved in wildfire management.
If you're from the intermountain west, in the western part of the United States, you know, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, you know, those are all states that hurt are seeing record years, year after year right now. And the people that live in are affected by fire weather that is, you know, you live in something called the wildland urban interface, which is where homes meet the forest. And so then you're at risk if you don't know how to coexist with wildfire. And if you haven't sort of taken some responsibility for preparing yourself for living in that area. You know, that's an incredibly important stakeholder community, right? The people and communities and towns that are affected. And then the other thing that we need to think about increasingly is the folks that are affected by smoke, because those fires are creating huge amounts of smoke and that smoke can travel, you know, 1000s of miles.
So then there are people who are affected by smoke, and those are important stakeholders. So you've got the wildland firefighting community, you've got towns and cities and residents who are affected by it. And then you've got folks that fall within the smoke sheds, where that that smoke has a fallout. So I think you've got a whole variety of, of potential stakeholders that are affected by wildland fire.
What Dr. Steelman said about an increasing number of people being affected is a great point. I remember seeing crazy photos and videos of the Skies turning brown and red from the fires last year. Personally, I'm from Southern California, so it was kind of a scary time. So how do these stakeholders fit into policymaking or other solutions for firefighting or mitigation? That's a really great question. Dr. Steelman also touched upon that
wildland fire is interesting, because you can't just solve the problem with say federal legislation, because a lot of the challenges rests at the local level, right. So if you are building in a wildland urban interface setting that really comes down to your local municipal city Town Council, zoning regulations or land use planning sort of consideration. So it's very much a local problem about where you're going to site and what kind of building codes you're going to have and what kind of evacuation standards you're going to have and how you're going to deal with it. States sometimes also have some land use planning requirements. But not always, it's really more of a local issue. And then you've got sort of the federal policymakers where they can provide funding and guidance and support but unless it trickles down and really has an impact at the local level, it's hard to get traction. So you have to have all three of those levels, the local, the state and the federal almost working together. And then of course, we can throw into that mix climate change, right, so we just had cop 26, right in Glasgow. And as part of that we're trying to solve the climate change problem. And, you know, as the world gets warmer, one of the there's a fascinating study related to warming in the Arctic is directly correlated to the increase in wildland fire activity that we're seeing in the American West. And so we're all connected when it comes to this climate change, you know, issue because what we see is that, as the Arctic warms, it changed
is the air patterns that then create more hot air arid air in the Western United States, and that those are very ripe conditions. Basically, for wildland fire for wildland fire, you need hot, dry, windy conditions. And that's what we're that was the connection that was made in the research that just came out in the last couple of weeks. And that's being forced by this change in what we're seeing, basically, in the Arctic. So we also need global policy. So you've got global policy, federal policy, state policy and local policy that all needs to work together in order for us to have a really effective approach to dealing with the complexity of wildland fire.
Wow, I had no idea wildland fire management was so complex, trying to coordinate local, state, federal and global policy seems really hard on its own. And, you know, then you had climate change on top of all that. Yeah, definitely. And Dr. Steelman, emphasizes that what makes it even harder is the fact that the climate crisis is an ever evolving situation. So the practices that were used 30 to 50 years ago, might not be the best solution anymore. Here, she explains more about that.
Well, I think that the you know, the systems that were put in place to fight wildland fire, were really in the 1970s. And, you know, the world has changed a lot in the last 50 years. If you just even think 30 years ago, you know, the world was, you know, cooler than it is now, you know, we're warmer now than it was. So if you go back and look at where we were in the 1970s, when our firefighting management and systems were put in place, the assumptions on which they are grounded, don't quite hold anymore, we can't assume we're fighting the same kind of fire, we can't assume we're going to have the same kind of resources to fight fire. And we can't assume that the same kind of firefighting tactics are going to work in that context. Because we have ample evidence that it's not. So we have to really question those assumptions about the severity of fire that we have about the resources because if we have so many fires taking place concurrently, we're not going to have the same kinds of resources to put on a fire. And historically, that has not been a huge constraint for us. But now it is we don't have the resources to put on it. And then finally, we just you know, there are some severity, intensity of fires that we're seeing.
Basically mean, you just can't put them out, you have to wait for the weather to change. And we shouldn't be putting firefighters, men and women in harm's way to put out those fires, we're just going to have to get smarter understanding where and when the things we can do as humans work, right? Like, we don't have hurricane fighters. We don't have tornado fighters, right? We understand that those are natural phenomenon where we have very little control. And now there's a certain segment of percentage of wildland fires that are falling into that area, they are so severe that there's just very little we can do about it. So we really have to question our assumptions. So we don't waste resources, put lives at risk unnecessarily, and get a little bit smarter about what we can do under the current conditions.
That's insane. We hear news about large fires raging across large swaths of land, but I don't know I always assumed that they were controllable to an extent, it's totally crazy. But luckily for us, the technology sector is becoming an increasingly important stakeholder in the wildfire space. And they're trying to use their tech to help the situation. Some examples include using thermal imaging technology to search and save wildlife software management tools to help responders and drones to collect data. Our second guest is Dr. Jason Schatz. Jason is a data scientist manager of Descartes Labs, which uses geospatial intelligence and data processing to answer questions about processes in the physical world. And one such problem they're tackling is wildfire detection. Jason graduated with a PhD in environment and resources at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and has been working on environmental projects ever since. Here's him giving a little intro on the wildfire detector projects that Decart Labs is undertaking
it like it was maybe three years ago, but they were we had a we're in the midst of a really bad drought in New Mexico and a really bad fire season like actually a group of us had just been on a run in the mountains like the evening before and then like the next day, they shut down public access to the forest because the drought was so bad and the wildfire risk was so high. And there were a couple wildfires first that we saw when we were on a run up there, and we came back down and group of folks that the company got together and pulled in started and started brainstorming how we could help. And one of the ideas we came up with was to just leverage our strengths, pooling and satellite imagery and create a real time wildfire detector. So that was not the primary person on this. I was. I tried to help where I could, but I think, yes, smarter people were doing the bulk of the work. But we created a pipeline to pull in imagery from a satellite called gos, which is, it's a geostationary weather satellite, but it works. But what that means it's like always over the same point in the earth. So it's just taking new images of everywhere in the US every like five to 15 minutes, depending on where you are and what's going on. And they're pretty coarse resolution, like a single pixel on there is like, one kilometer resolution or so. So it's pretty coarse. But wildfires tend to be so hot that even if there's just a small one within the pixel, you can you can detect it. So. So yeah, we stood up a pipeline that I think it's still running, we actually have a fires channel in our Slack where you can you can check in and see what's what's being detected. Yeah, it's like, I think the latency is like five to 10 minutes. So like, you know, imagery is collected on the satellite, it gets beamed down to us. We process it and like output alerts of wildfires, like while they're happening.
That's pretty cool. It's crazy how one pixel on the screen can indicate something much bigger happening in real time. And yes, definitely, I think wildfires have only become more prominent in recent years. And it's devastating how intense some of the repercussions can be, especially as rural areas continue to increase with growing population and development. However, hearing about the work Descartes Labs does makes me hopeful that technological tools can be used to mitigate these natural disasters. For sure, if we can detect these fires earlier on, perhaps we can stop some of the most severe damage from occurring. This does make me curious, though, about how this mountain of data can be used in further research and wildfire management. So I asked Jason, about the overarching trends seen in fires through geospatial analytics.
I think I mean, the same, the same trends everyone else has seen, like the number and intensity of fires everywhere. I think we're primarily monitoring the United States, but you could look in Europe and a lot of other places in the world and see the same trends, but But yeah, the frequency and the intensity, and like the severity of impacts, I think has increased everywhere. And that's like, both due to weather and climate and climate change specifically. And like ecosystem management practices, like, you know, kind of a legacy of decades of fire suppression, and also just the encroachment of like human settlements and wild lands. So there's just a lot more vulnerable infrastructure there to be to be impacted.
Right, I think a lot of time, it's easy to hear about these large scale events in the news, and then forget about the root of the problem. The warming cycle means hotter and drier conditions, which feeds into high risk wildfires and prolonged fire seasons. Yes, which makes the carts work so important. Of course, it's not just about sensing fires, it's also about how you apply these tools. So I asked Jason about what tecarta is doing with their data, as well as how sensitive it is.
We worked with the LA Times, we said and I can't remember if he's still feed there. They're like, well, well, live wildfire map or not. And we've also worked with the state of New Mexico just like giving them alerts that they can like check out or not depending on like where it is and how high priority it seems to be. So yeah, we've been we worked with them for a couple of years, feeding them our wildfire alerts, I think I mean, I think the most interesting thing to me was honestly, that it worked like that it worked as well as it was that it could pick up events that were as subtle is, as were possible with that kind of satellite because like I said, it is really coarse resolution. But the fact that it takes an image so frequently, and that the instrument itself is so good, often will detect things like prescribed burns that aren't like aren't huge, and they're managed well. So they're not super intense, but we can see them. In one time we detected like, I can't remember what city it was their city in Texas. It was on the Fourth of July and it was like their fireworks display. Which was ridiculous but but yeah, I think I think just the sensitivity and the capability of the instrument itself, which is I don't know one of the one of the greatest things about satellite imagery this that like, depending on what you're looking for, you do kind of have an always on view of what's happening on the landscape, whether it be wildfires, or a lot of stuff my team focuses on, which is like monitoring for deforestation and loss of above ground carbon and forests and things like that. So, so yeah, just kind of nice, comprehensive view that are provides is really cool to see and learn new stuff every day.
That's awesome. It's so interesting to see how large organizations can mobilize initiatives around this data, and even more how this data can be applied in real world situations. What do you think, Jesse? Yeah, I know a decent amount about wildfires. But hearing about the things this technology is capable of was really astounding. I was curious if any other data practices or AI tech have been utilized for wildfires, or even within the climate change space that could potentially be useful for the future. Here's what Jason had to say.
Yeah, that's, that's been one of the coolest things. And I mean, another another thing that we're we're working on this tangential to wildfires is where we're using satellite imagery to provide kind of a live view of above ground forest biomass all over the world. So like, just how much vegetation matter is there at any given time, how much is being lost, how much is being gained and so on. And
one of the applications we have in mind is just using that to provide predictions of how vulnerable different areas are to wildfires. So if you combine the amount of biomass and fuel load with like how dry it is at the time, I can, hopefully be a good predictor of how much risk there is for things like wildfires.
I didn't realize there was so much work being done in the wildfire sector, it was super insightful to hear from such distinct approaches to dealing with the same issue. Before we close out, let's hear what advice our guest speakers have for our audience.
We all can do something. So I mean, I think one thing is just educate yourselves about what is driving, you know, wildland fire, it's not all bad. And that's an assumption that a lot of people make is that fire is actually a bad thing. It's not, it's actually essential for our ecosystems. And if we're going to create more sustainable landscapes, we need more fire on the ground, and we need to figure out a way to make that happen. So educating yourself about the the problem first and foremost, I think is really important. I think the second thing that you can do is understand that climate change is a big part of the challenge that we face with wildland fire, because with climate change, we will see more hot, dry, windy weather, which are all the preconditions for more wildland fire. Every study indicates this for us, especially in the western United States. So you know, understanding climate change is a driver, not only in wildland fire, but other kinds of extreme form of weather that we experience is important. And making those connections because all of us can have conversations with people we may or may not agree with in our lives about how things are changing. And at the end of the day, everybody cares about their community, everybody cares about where their kids go to school. And this can be a really good entry point for having conversations with other people, like I said, that we may not necessarily agree with, but we can understand that things are changing. And I think that's an important thing that we can do is lean into some of those conversations, then the final thing I would say is that if you're a resident of one of these western states, you are likely directly affected in some way by Wildfire, whether that smoke or living in, you know, in an area that experiences wildfire, and you need to educate yourself about the risks and the opportunities associated with living in one of these states.
Jason shares the same sentiment, but he also emphasizes that you don't have to be sure of your path, your path doesn't have to be linear, just fill a space where you see it.
And I think, you know, the same lessons we had there in terms of like getting involved in having an impact apply here to like, you know, if you really care about a cause, and you are knowledgeable about it, like there's really no substitute for just like deciding to have an impact and like figuring out the best way to do it. And you know, there's no, there's no formula or roadmap, I think it's just a matter of like, getting in there and doing something like you know, emailing someone, maybe you get to know and then emailing the next person you can think of and eventually if you you know, if you persist long enough, you'll like uncover an opportunity to fill some gaps or like push someone in the right direction and have a real impact.
Dr. Stillman and Jason both give some great advice. As a person who grew up in fire prone California and as a student who's trying to find her place in the climate change sector. I will definitely take their words to heart. I think this idea of not having a roadmap or a formulaic procedure to success is, in most cases, a reality that everyone has to encounter at some point. On that note, I hope their words are as useful to our listeners as they were to me. See y'all next time.
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