Lightning Talks
ProWESS Data Challenge Launch Event
November 22, 2024
The Wildfire Science & Technology Commons (WSTC) is excited to share with the community details around the upcoming ProWESS Data Challenge. Learn about this challenge and the anticipated outcomes from this multi-week experience.
Tools in Wildfire Management
December 6, 2024
Conversation with Chris Anthony, a Fellow at the Proactive Wildfire & Environmental Sustainability Solutions (ProWESS) Center. Chris discusses wildfire policy, the prescribed burn planning cycle, and the promise of 3D fire modeling tools like BurnPro3D.
Role of Burn Bosses in Managing Wildfires
December 9, 2024
Conversation with Matthew Snider, a Training Specialist at the New Mexico Consortium. Matt talks about planning a prescribed burn, the responsibilities of burn bosses, and how they can use 3d fire modeling to make their burns safer and more effective.
Fire and 3D Fuels
December 12, 2024
Conversation with David Robinson, a Postdoctorate Researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. David walks us through how 3D fire models such as QUIC-Fire work and why having tree lists and vegetation data is so important to understanding how fires behave.
Prescribed Burn Planning with BurnPro3D
December 9, 2024
Conversation with Leticia Lee, a Computational Data Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Leticia shows us all the inputs that drive BurnPro3D and how it uses fire models to help prescribed burn bosses choose ignition dates and patterns to maximize the safety and efficiency of their burns.
Vegetation Modeling
December 16, 2024
Conversation with Russ Parsons, a research ecologist at the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, and Anthony Marcozzi, a software engineer and researcher for the New Mexico Consortium. Russ and Anthony describe how data scientists and ecologists build vegetation models from inputs such as terrestrial and aerial LiDAR.
Terrestrial LiDAR
December 6, 2024
Conversation with Scott Pokswinski, Director of Fire Science Applications at the New Mexico Consortium. Scott discusses terrestrial LiDAR, including how the technology works, its promises and limitations in sensing individual trees, and how it can combine with other data to provide high-quality vegetation models.
Prescribed Burn Planning with QUIC-Fire and QUIC-SMOKE
December 10, 2024
Conversation with Sara Brambilla, Team Lead for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sara joins us to talk about how QUIC-SMOKE extends the applications of fire models to teach us about the downstream effects of wildfires and prescribed burns, including smoke dispersal.
Prescribed Burning, Surface Fuels, and DUET
December 17, 2024
Conversation with Jenna McDanold, a Postdoctorate Researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jenna dives deeper into vegetation modeling by explaining how DUET takes tree data and builds a model for ground fuels like leaf litter and grass by predicting leaf fall and using wind data and rates of leaf decay.