Wildfire Exposure and Directional Vulnerability Assessments
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The Scottish Forestry Trust recently supported Bangor University student, Sarah Wild in attending the Wildland Fire Canada Conference in New Brunswick, 28 October - 1 November 2024. In this blog post, Sarah reports on the conference and the insights gleaned that will undoubtedly support her MSc research.
I am a career-changer currently studying at Bangor University and over the course of my studies I have become particularly interested in wildfire and the threat it poses to forests, as well as to communities and landscapes. I was fortunate to receive funding from The Scottish Forestry Trust that enabled me to attend the Wildland Fire Canada Conference and in particular a workshop – Wildfire Exposure and Directional Vulnerability Assessments: Methods and Applications – a workshop that will greatly benefit my MSc dissertation.
The assessments are a new way of quantifying the risk of wildfire to an asset such as a community or forest. Many complex factors affect wildfire and, with the climate changing, models predict an increase in the frequency of weather conditions that will make forests in the UK more susceptible to fire [1]. While many assessments factor in all the variables affecting wildfire spread, these assessments have decoupled the vegetation fuel from the mix in order to provide a simple way for forest managers to assess and manage a controllable factor, ahead of the variable weather.
The directional vulnerability assessment, which identifies potential fire pathways into a valued location based on wildfire exposure ratings, is used by practitioners across Canada and is beginning to be used internationally as well. However, it is not known whether the assessments can be applied effectively in the same way to the British landscape, and so my MSc dissertation will explore its validity in the UK.
The workshop was led by the researchers who developed the assessments, Dr Jen Beverly and Air Forbes of the University of Alberta, Canada [2]. I learned to calculate the exposure of an asset to wildfire, and from which directions it was most vulnerable. The resulting radial graphs provide a striking visual that are easy to interpret, and would be very useful as part of the toolkit for strategic planning for activities such as proactive fuel management and evacuation planning [3].
I am extremely grateful to The Scottish Forestry Trust for supporting my attendance in order that I may further my research into forest wildfire risk assessments.
References.
[1] Arnell, N.W., Freeman, A. and Gazzard, R. (2021) ‘The effect of climate change on indicators of fire danger in the UK’, Environmental Research Letters, 16(4), p. 044027. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abd9f2
[2] Wildfire Analytics. Website. https://wildfireanalytics.org
[3] Beverly, J.L. and Forbes, A.M. (2023) ‘Assessing directional vulnerability to wildfire’, Natural Hazards, 117(1), pp. 831–849. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05885-3
The Scottish Forestry Trust's Early Career Researchers Fund supports recently qualified researchers to attend relevant conferences and symposiums in the UK, as well as overseas. The conferences must have relevance to UK forestry, and afford the individual an opportunity to present research findings or establish new collaborative networks. Up to 30% of eligible costs to a maximum of £1,000 per individual are available.
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- Forestry
- Forestry
- The Scottish Forestry Trust
- Wildfire