PyroLife Symposium - Webinar Summaries

Highlights from the second PyroLife Symposium on June 10, 2020 by Nemer Abusamha. To prepare for unprecedented wildfires amplified by climate change, a lack of fuel management and vast urbanization, fire agencies, and managers use fire forecasting and risk prediction tools to improve decision making in wildland fire management. Over the last years, fire agencies and fire managers have faced unprecedented wildfires that require applied fire sciences with diverse other disciplines for them to make better decisions. Such integration produces operational tools and software for predicting wildfires hazard and to reduce wildfire risk. Operational wildfires software and applications provide integrated […]

Synopsis by Judith Kirschner and Mariña Fernández. Over the last years, Europe has experienced the onset of unprecedented wildfire seasons. Marc Castellnou discusses lessons learned in the Mediterranean and what to expect for temperate Europe. Highlights: During the last decade, countries in Southern Europe experienced increasingly severe wildfire seasons mainly due to changes in land use and enhanced by global warming. A similar increase in wildfire events is expected for Central and Northern Europe. Experience from the Mediterranean shows that land management is an essential tool to decrease fuel loads, interrupt landscape connectivity and thereby reduce vulnerability to extreme wildfires. […]

Highlights from the PyroLife Symposium webinar on June 3, 2020 by Bethany E. Hannah and Kathleen Uyttewaal. Dr. Cathelijne Stoof kicked off the 2020 PyroLife International Symposium with a presentation that introduced the PyroLife project, discussed the need for diversity within the greater wildland fire community, and gave some insight into how we might address some of the challenges societies will encounter as we transition to living with fire. Pyrogeography and PyroLife Cathelijne is a pyrogeographer and her experience in this field is what gave rise to the PyroLife project. Pyrogeography studies the spatial distribution of fire on the planet. […]