Project Details

Our objectives are to work with fire management agencies in Alberta and Ontario, and a diverse group of ecologists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists, to:

1. Develop a spatially explicit fire occurrence prediction model, and couple it with a mechanistic fire spread model, to predict how fires will ignite and spread on a hypothetical wildland urban interface landscape that contains forest stands, fuel breaks, lakes, rivers, roads, communities, remote cabins, and other features that are characteristic of the boreal forest region of Canada;
2. Embed that flammable wildland urban interface model in a larger, comprehensive simulation modelling framework that can be used to specify integrated fire management strategies (e.g., prevention, fuel treatment, and building code impacts on structures), to predict the probability or risk that designated areas or structures will be burned during designated time intervals;
3. Work with ecologists and social scientists to develop methods for assessing the impact of fire on public safety and property, and link our decision support systems with the socio-economic models they develop, so fire managers can use the aggregate system to carry out comprehensive analyses of strategies for dealing with fire in wildland urban interface areas; and
4. Work with representatives of fire management agencies in Alberta and Ontario, to elicit from them their understanding of wildland urban interface fire behaviour and its social, ecological, and economic impacts, and to field test our decision support system.