The Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit Grant for Investigating Climatic Drivers of Wildland Fire Events

This is a continuing project that provides learning opportunities to students in the principles of climate modeling, prediction of fire risks and public land management. The goal is to find linkages between climatic patterns in precipitation and temperature and fire frequency and severity in key vegetation communities within the Central Great Basin and Colorado Plateau Ecoregions, specifically identifying key climatic drivers in fire events. For example similar research in southern California chaparral communities found that the timing of large fire events is strongly linked with the amount of precipitation in April, the end of the wet season in that ecoregion. Additionally the information gained may be used by federal and state agencies in refining larger scale regional climate and fire modeling based on Landfire data providing more detailed or community specific prediction capabilities.