-: All right, thank you a lot for staying after lunch,
and excited to talk with you about a portion of my
research program.
A lot of it really delving around fire,
and especially in our native ecosystem,
so we have a lot of work going on in Nebraska
with our rangeland, shrubland, forest-type ecosystems.
And so yeah, appreciate, appreciate the opportunity.
-: Is this right?
-: Looks good.
-: Okay, there you go.
-: Thank you.
Okay, so driving around Nebraska
as a new professor and you do things with sustainability
of grassland resources that for thousands of years
or a legacy of fire and you see these kind of signs.
This is how you total a vehicle.
You know, when the shock value of range fires are
destructive, help prevent them.
So, one of the impact statements that you might see from
me in the future is where these signs come down
based on our research.
And I'll show you some examples of that.
Now I want to take a step back with we're talking about
my lab and some of the growth,
and a lot of the details that I won't show 'cause of
five minute talk is really the result of a lot of work
that's going on in the lab.
We've got one Postdoc, Dr. Wonkka.
And then six other graduate students working here right now.
A couple of those will be gone in the 2016.
And we're fortunate to have funding to bring on
PhD student, Tori Donovan, January,
and then six other graduate positions.
We'll also have a partner position with Nebraska Forest
Service, and all these are associated with...
Fire, rangeland, forest-type of stewardship and resilience
in the systems and I'm starting to understand,
for these types of study areas,
what's driving some of the transformations of what
we want in grasslands and forests that are undesirable,
and how do we get those products back?
That's productive in a lot of those ecosystem
services we want.
We also have a lot of biome level work
and continental work that's starting to emerge.
So when I talk about biome level work,
I'm talkin' about, you know, here we're looking at the
Great Plains, a grassland dominated system.
So this kind of off orange color.
And there's two novel transformations that are occurring
that haven't occurred previously in, you know,
paleo literature.
One of those associated with the different type of
combustion than you were thinking of,
but oil and gas development and we've done some work in it
with a novel type of transformation that's occurring
at a continental scale.
But also, juniper invasions, which are associated with
loss of fire, the lack there of.
And the transformation of grassland,
things that look like this.
And this has already occurred across many areas of
the southern Great Plains.
And this is what I'm talking about.
This kind of change this is everywhere where it's greater
than 50 percent cover, and that's shown with NRCS data
on private lands.
And this is moving north,
so watch as I go through.
Everything will become this.
It doesn't stop, it goes to that endpoint.
So we'll to 30 percent juniper cover.
This is less canyons in Nebraska.
So we'll come to here.
This is 15 percent juniper cover.
And this is everywhere it's present.
So Nebraska's right now, our front lines
of this type of transformation.
And so that's where a lot of this support is coming from,
is how do we stop something that is occurring at this level?
And the reason it's important is 'cause it has a big impact
on a variety of ecosystem services.
So this is the value that we had from grasslands.
If we transform to juniper woodland,
and it's negative, it'll come here in the blue.
If it's positive, it would go this direction.
So livestock production, we see an 80 percent decline
in livestock productivity potential.
So that's why you see this big decline.
New work out of Oklahoma State shows declines
in streamflow, so water resources.
No net change in carbon sequestration.
Mostly because most of the carbon gain is above ground,
and that's not a very stable form.
Declines in air quality,
but a lot of research and debate in that.
And of course, a lot of our loss of grassland birds
and wildlife diversity.
For this reason, we're seeing this talked about constantly.
Juniper invasion, one of the greatest threats to rangeland
resources and in 2014 Nebraska listed as the biggest threat
to conservation in the state.
So, that's what we're focused around.
What this has lead to because it's so expensive
on a continental scale to do the kinds of management
we've done in the past is to turn back to fire.
And so everywhere there's a green, all this green is where
that biome level transformation takes place.
All these dots are where landowners are starting to
come together to put fire back on the landscape.
So I showed you the why fire is becoming a big issue,
again, and not just talk about the cool things
associated with fire.
Everywhere you see here in red,
are areas where landowners are using extreme fire
in order to try and take and restore grasslands
back from juniper woodlands.
And they're getting exemptions to it in a lot of areas,
and it's building up new capacity with things like
understanding the importance of fire in youth.
Getting involved in it.
And those are some areas that we're studying.
We've also done studies like this,
where we control extreme fire in wildfire conditions
and study them.
So that gets that extreme fire topic.
So here's a short video that shows this from work in Texas.
This is in no wind speed conditions.
This used to be a grassland.
Just so everybody knows.
This is the kind of transformation we're talking about.
What you'll see is a real extreme form of fire behavior
that's typical of our wildfire conditions.
When we actually did this fire,
there were wildfires going on around us.
A lot like studying a disease, right?
A scientist, we control environment in order to study
things that are often very dangerous.
And this is a head fire moving in this direction
with a slight wind,
and because of the fuel's distribution,
you see something called a blowup.
And this is where you have a lot of our firefighters
that get in bad situations or a surprise occurs.
So watch this doubling of flame height
that occurs here in a second.
And just that kind of non-stationary behavior.
Now this transform systems in a way that's very positive
if you're looking at loss of livestock productivity
in a lot of this ecotourism, and so forth.
But we can also understand a lot about just
how fire functions.
So, kind of an interesting video.
That's about 40 foot tall flame lengths that I just showed
you for sense of scale.
So look at the parking garages around you.
But this is what we're starting to do is link these models
together to understand how physical mechanisms,
and so this is based on Law of Conservation of Energy,
that's been done by fire physicists
linked to a lot of our ecological models,
and so this is kinda that connection of how do we use
fire and actually to restore desirable
properties in this system?
I mostly show this because I wanna show you that we are
doing some science and not just doing some kinda
pretty videos and pictures.
So look at that, everything's quantitative,
except some of those, some of those gaps where we
have disciplinary boundaries,
so that's what we're starting to merge.
Now we're not just looking at some of the science
end of it, we're tryin' to help build transformative
capacities in new ways.
And really start to look, can we help people do things
more effective and more safely?
This was actually on the front page of
Omaha World Herald this week.
The title of this was like, "Flaming Balls Falling From the
"Sky Can Be Good".
(laughter)
So now I know how Nebraska football coaches feel
with some of the headlines that come out in papers.
(laughter)
So, you know, there's some video that's embedded
in some of those news stories.
Check it out.
But we're really tryin' to look at this in new ways
because a lot of the science and technology of how
we viewed fire has been the same for the last few decades.
So can we start to restore what we value from a lot of
our rangelands by startin' to look at this
in some different ways?
So with that, I thank you.
(applause)