Participants at the Workshop on Wildland Fire Appropriate Response: Generating and Using Science • February 27 and 28, 2018
Workshop on Wildland
Fire Appropriate
Response: Generating
and Using Science
February 27 and 28, 2018 • Western University
Organizers: Douglas Woolford and Matt Davison
(Western University), Charmaine Dean (University
of Waterloo), Colin McFayden (Ontario Ministry of
Natural Resources & Forestry), and Mike Wotton
(Canadian Forest Service)
How do you put out a forest fire? Should you
sometimes let it burn? Which mathematical and
statistical techniques can be used to aid wildland
fire response? These were some of the questions
addressed by the two-day Workshop on Wildland
Fire Appropriate Response: Generating and Using
Science at Western University this past February.
The workshop was intentionally cross-disciplinary
so that academic researchers and fire management
agency staff could identify and make rapid progress
on key topics of interest to fire management
agencies. It was sponsored by the Aviation, Forest
Fire and Emergency Services Branch of the Ontario
Ministry of Natural Resources (AFFES-MNRF),
Western University’s newly formed School of
Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, and the Fields
Institute.
Participants comprised researchers and students
from the computational, environmental, operational
research, mathematical, and statistical sciences
along with staff from Canadian wildland fire
management agencies and the US Forest Service.
The overarching objective was to strengthen
emerging multidisciplinary teams from a network of
universities to collaborate directly on high-impact
research problems. Barriers and opportunities to
generate new data-driven science were discussed,
along with how to bring the resulting research into
practical use for wildland fire management decision
support.
The three sections of the workshop's schedule
provided opportunities to identify, design and
work on solutions directly with researchers and fire
management practitioners:
1. Context setting (presentations on fire
management problems and academic solutions),
2. Decision support systems used or being
developed by agencies, and
3. Break-out sessions to identify specific areas
of work and requirements under the broader
categories of decision support and appropriate
response.
The context was set through a series of short
presentations where fire management agency staff
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