Fire
Dr. Dirac Twidwell
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01/07/2016
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Fire presented by Dr. Dirac Twidwell
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- [00:00:00.563]All right, thank you a lot for staying after lunch,
- [00:00:03.744]and excited to talk with you about a portion of my
- [00:00:06.345]research program.
- [00:00:07.877]A lot of it really delving around fire,
- [00:00:10.362]and especially in our native ecosystem,
- [00:00:12.940]so we have a lot of work going on in Nebraska
- [00:00:14.959]with our rangeland, shrubland, forest-type ecosystems.
- [00:00:20.937]And so yeah, appreciate, appreciate the opportunity.
- [00:00:24.736]Is this right?
- [00:00:25.920]Looks good.
- [00:00:27.128]Okay, there you go.
- [00:00:28.661]Thank you.
- [00:00:31.562]Okay, so driving around Nebraska
- [00:00:33.839]as a new professor and you do things with sustainability
- [00:00:36.949]of grassland resources that for thousands of years
- [00:00:40.896]or a legacy of fire and you see these kind of signs.
- [00:00:43.939]This is how you total a vehicle.
- [00:00:45.540]You know, when the shock value of range fires are
- [00:00:48.674]destructive, help prevent them.
- [00:00:50.578]So, one of the impact statements that you might see from
- [00:00:53.807]me in the future is where these signs come down
- [00:00:55.687]based on our research.
- [00:00:56.848]And I'll show you some examples of that.
- [00:01:00.653]Now I want to take a step back with we're talking about
- [00:01:05.161]my lab and some of the growth,
- [00:01:07.715]and a lot of the details that I won't show 'cause of
- [00:01:09.711]five minute talk is really the result of a lot of work
- [00:01:12.939]that's going on in the lab.
- [00:01:14.401]We've got one Postdoc, Dr. Wonkka.
- [00:01:16.469]And then six other graduate students working here right now.
- [00:01:21.211]A couple of those will be gone in the 2016.
- [00:01:24.067]And we're fortunate to have funding to bring on
- [00:01:26.436]PhD student, Tori Donovan, January,
- [00:01:28.780]and then six other graduate positions.
- [00:01:31.357]We'll also have a partner position with Nebraska Forest
- [00:01:34.468]Service, and all these are associated with...
- [00:01:38.367]Fire, rangeland, forest-type of stewardship and resilience
- [00:01:43.104]in the systems and I'm starting to understand,
- [00:01:46.215]for these types of study areas,
- [00:01:47.562]what's driving some of the transformations of what
- [00:01:50.232]we want in grasslands and forests that are undesirable,
- [00:01:53.901]and how do we get those products back?
- [00:01:55.759]That's productive in a lot of those ecosystem
- [00:01:58.104]services we want.
- [00:01:59.404]We also have a lot of biome level work
- [00:02:01.238]and continental work that's starting to emerge.
- [00:02:04.768]So when I talk about biome level work,
- [00:02:06.393]I'm talkin' about, you know, here we're looking at the
- [00:02:08.320]Great Plains, a grassland dominated system.
- [00:02:11.083]So this kind of off orange color.
- [00:02:13.751]And there's two novel transformations that are occurring
- [00:02:16.213]that haven't occurred previously in, you know,
- [00:02:19.464]paleo literature.
- [00:02:21.113]One of those associated with the different type of
- [00:02:23.133]combustion than you were thinking of,
- [00:02:24.664]but oil and gas development and we've done some work in it
- [00:02:27.498]with a novel type of transformation that's occurring
- [00:02:30.516]at a continental scale.
- [00:02:32.304]But also, juniper invasions, which are associated with
- [00:02:34.835]loss of fire, the lack there of.
- [00:02:37.691]And the transformation of grassland,
- [00:02:39.292]things that look like this.
- [00:02:40.934]And this has already occurred across many areas of
- [00:02:42.791]the southern Great Plains.
- [00:02:44.440]And this is what I'm talking about.
- [00:02:45.949]This kind of change this is everywhere where it's greater
- [00:02:48.176]than 50 percent cover, and that's shown with NRCS data
- [00:02:51.914]on private lands.
- [00:02:53.215]And this is moving north,
- [00:02:54.632]so watch as I go through.
- [00:02:56.210]Everything will become this.
- [00:02:57.742]It doesn't stop, it goes to that endpoint.
- [00:03:00.018]So we'll to 30 percent juniper cover.
- [00:03:02.782]This is less canyons in Nebraska.
- [00:03:05.287]So we'll come to here.
- [00:03:06.680]This is 15 percent juniper cover.
- [00:03:09.025]And this is everywhere it's present.
- [00:03:10.953]So Nebraska's right now, our front lines
- [00:03:14.946]of this type of transformation.
- [00:03:17.407]And so that's where a lot of this support is coming from,
- [00:03:20.705]is how do we stop something that is occurring at this level?
- [00:03:24.233]And the reason it's important is 'cause it has a big impact
- [00:03:27.484]on a variety of ecosystem services.
- [00:03:30.433]So this is the value that we had from grasslands.
- [00:03:33.451]If we transform to juniper woodland,
- [00:03:35.449]and it's negative, it'll come here in the blue.
- [00:03:38.490]If it's positive, it would go this direction.
- [00:03:41.555]So livestock production, we see an 80 percent decline
- [00:03:44.156]in livestock productivity potential.
- [00:03:46.198]So that's why you see this big decline.
- [00:03:48.033]New work out of Oklahoma State shows declines
- [00:03:50.077]in streamflow, so water resources.
- [00:03:52.955]No net change in carbon sequestration.
- [00:03:55.788]Mostly because most of the carbon gain is above ground,
- [00:03:58.320]and that's not a very stable form.
- [00:04:00.409]Declines in air quality,
- [00:04:02.359]but a lot of research and debate in that.
- [00:04:04.937]And of course, a lot of our loss of grassland birds
- [00:04:07.490]and wildlife diversity.
- [00:04:10.370]For this reason, we're seeing this talked about constantly.
- [00:04:12.947]Juniper invasion, one of the greatest threats to rangeland
- [00:04:15.408]resources and in 2014 Nebraska listed as the biggest threat
- [00:04:19.077]to conservation in the state.
- [00:04:21.840]So, that's what we're focused around.
- [00:04:23.512]What this has lead to because it's so expensive
- [00:04:25.834]on a continental scale to do the kinds of management
- [00:04:28.178]we've done in the past is to turn back to fire.
- [00:04:31.243]And so everywhere there's a green, all this green is where
- [00:04:34.912]that biome level transformation takes place.
- [00:04:37.792]All these dots are where landowners are starting to
- [00:04:40.206]come together to put fire back on the landscape.
- [00:04:43.202]So I showed you the why fire is becoming a big issue,
- [00:04:46.893]again, and not just talk about the cool things
- [00:04:48.890]associated with fire.
- [00:04:50.232]Everywhere you see here in red,
- [00:04:52.163]are areas where landowners are using extreme fire
- [00:04:55.716]in order to try and take and restore grasslands
- [00:04:58.594]back from juniper woodlands.
- [00:05:00.869]And they're getting exemptions to it in a lot of areas,
- [00:05:02.403]and it's building up new capacity with things like
- [00:05:04.677]understanding the importance of fire in youth.
- [00:05:06.767]Getting involved in it.
- [00:05:08.694]And those are some areas that we're studying.
- [00:05:10.674]We've also done studies like this,
- [00:05:12.415]where we control extreme fire in wildfire conditions
- [00:05:16.711]and study them.
- [00:05:18.174]So that gets that extreme fire topic.
- [00:05:22.535]So here's a short video that shows this from work in Texas.
- [00:05:26.602]This is in no wind speed conditions.
- [00:05:29.017]This used to be a grassland.
- [00:05:31.478]Just so everybody knows.
- [00:05:33.035]This is the kind of transformation we're talking about.
- [00:05:35.147]What you'll see is a real extreme form of fire behavior
- [00:05:38.375]that's typical of our wildfire conditions.
- [00:05:40.697]When we actually did this fire,
- [00:05:42.021]there were wildfires going on around us.
- [00:05:44.180]A lot like studying a disease, right?
- [00:05:46.129]A scientist, we control environment in order to study
- [00:05:49.496]things that are often very dangerous.
- [00:05:51.889]And this is a head fire moving in this direction
- [00:05:55.422]with a slight wind,
- [00:05:56.676]and because of the fuel's distribution,
- [00:05:58.695]you see something called a blowup.
- [00:06:00.552]And this is where you have a lot of our firefighters
- [00:06:02.620]that get in bad situations or a surprise occurs.
- [00:06:06.009]So watch this doubling of flame height
- [00:06:07.913]that occurs here in a second.
- [00:06:09.724]And just that kind of non-stationary behavior.
- [00:06:12.767]Now this transform systems in a way that's very positive
- [00:06:15.437]if you're looking at loss of livestock productivity
- [00:06:17.665]in a lot of this ecotourism, and so forth.
- [00:06:19.987]But we can also understand a lot about just
- [00:06:21.752]how fire functions.
- [00:06:23.517]So, kind of an interesting video.
- [00:06:24.910]That's about 40 foot tall flame lengths that I just showed
- [00:06:27.905]you for sense of scale.
- [00:06:29.484]So look at the parking garages around you.
- [00:06:31.782]But this is what we're starting to do is link these models
- [00:06:34.568]together to understand how physical mechanisms,
- [00:06:38.051]and so this is based on Law of Conservation of Energy,
- [00:06:40.583]that's been done by fire physicists
- [00:06:43.137]linked to a lot of our ecological models,
- [00:06:45.413]and so this is kinda that connection of how do we use
- [00:06:48.129]fire and actually to restore desirable
- [00:06:49.964]properties in this system?
- [00:06:51.681]I mostly show this because I wanna show you that we are
- [00:06:54.747]doing some science and not just doing some kinda
- [00:06:56.117]pretty videos and pictures.
- [00:06:57.579]So look at that, everything's quantitative,
- [00:07:00.968]except some of those, some of those gaps where we
- [00:07:04.081]have disciplinary boundaries,
- [00:07:05.404]so that's what we're starting to merge.
- [00:07:06.773]Now we're not just looking at some of the science
- [00:07:08.771]end of it, we're tryin' to help build transformative
- [00:07:10.790]capacities in new ways.
- [00:07:12.556]And really start to look, can we help people do things
- [00:07:17.501]more effective and more safely?
- [00:07:20.836]This was actually on the front page of
- [00:07:22.972]Omaha World Herald this week.
- [00:07:24.806]The title of this was like, "Flaming Balls Falling From the
- [00:07:29.937]"Sky Can Be Good".
- [00:07:31.771](laughter)
- [00:07:33.676]So now I know how Nebraska football coaches feel
- [00:07:35.649]with some of the headlines that come out in papers.
- [00:07:37.460](laughter)
- [00:07:38.436]So, you know, there's some video that's embedded
- [00:07:40.572]in some of those news stories.
- [00:07:42.104]Check it out.
- [00:07:43.242]But we're really tryin' to look at this in new ways
- [00:07:45.982]because a lot of the science and technology of how
- [00:07:49.232]we viewed fire has been the same for the last few decades.
- [00:07:52.692]So can we start to restore what we value from a lot of
- [00:07:55.059]our rangelands by startin' to look at this
- [00:07:57.522]in some different ways?
- [00:07:59.100]So with that, I thank you.
- [00:08:01.051](applause)
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