Friends of Fire

Discover how NASA is launching into the frontier of fire science!

Join Christian Fernandez, Southern Fire Exchange outreach specialist, as he guides you through a saga of collaboration, co-production, and integration between fire science and management. This tale is about the 2025 Fort Stewart research campaign: a week-long event that united researchers, administrators, and practitioners to study the same prescribed burns at the same time and work together to develop tools for the next century of wildland fire management.

In this episode, Christian is joined by Jacquelyn Shuman & Harrison Raine, NASA FireSense, to learn more about the role of NASA’s FireSense program in the 2025 campaign. They explore how co-productive science can be built into the very foundation of a program, how air and space-borne technology can be leveraged for wildland fire, and–ultimately–how NASA is way more than just rockets. Strap in, and get ready for liftoff, as we brave the frontier of collaborative fire science!

Learn more about NASA FireSense.

Learn more about the Integrated Research Management Team.

Learn more about collaborative research burns.

Learn about the 2022 Fort Stewart research campaign.

*Music credit: Musictown on Pixabay

Discover the story of "The Great Pivot", where a massive research campaign defied the impossible!

Join Christian Fernandez, Southern Fire Exchange outreach specialist, as he guides you through a saga of collaboration, co-production, and integration between fire science and management. This tale is about the 2025 Fort Stewart research campaign: a week-long event that united researchers, administrators, and practitioners to study the same prescribed burns at the same time and work together to develop tools for the next century of wildland fire management.

In this mini episode, Christian is joined again by James Furman, US Forest Service, and Daniel Gualtieri, The Ember Alliance, to tell what’s perhaps the greatest story within this story. The “Great Pivot”, as it became known, was a migration of the entire campaign from Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida to Fort Stewart in Georgia due to fire weather, two weeks before the event was slated to take place. The three explore how both the Eastern Innovation Landscape Network and Integrated Research Management Team were instrumental in coordinating this logistical feat and making really good lemonade out of the lemons that were dealt. All the while you'll be immersed right in the action with exciting, real-time audio from the field.

⁠Learn more about the Integrated Research Management Team.⁠

⁠Learn more about collaborative research burns.⁠

⁠Learn about the 2022 Fort Stewart research campaign.⁠

*Music credit: Musictown on Pixabay

Discover how 542 years of combined experience are shaping the integration of fire science and management!

Join Christian Fernandez, Southern Fire Exchange outreach specialist, as he guides you through a saga of collaboration, co-production, and integration between fire science and management. This tale is about the 2025 Fort Stewart research campaign: a week-long event that united researchers, administrators, and practitioners to study the same prescribed burns at the same time and work together to develop tools for the next century of wildland fire management.

In this episode, Christian is joined by James Furman, US Forest Service, and Daniel Gualtieri, The Ember Alliance, to learn more about the Eastern Innovation Landscape Network and Integrated Research Management Team (IRMT). They explore how regional collaborations provided the foundation for the 2025 campaign, and how the IRMT’s 542 years of combined experience was leveraged to facilitate such a large undertaking. All the while, you’ll be immersed right in the action with exciting, real-time audio from the field.

Learn more about the Integrated Research Management Team.

Learn more about collaborative research burns.

Learn about the 2022 Fort Stewart research campaign.

*Music credit: Musictown on Pixabay

Discover how a culture of innovation is paving the way for the future of wildland fire!

Join Christian Fernandez, Southern Fire Exchange outreach specialist, as he guides you through a saga of collaboration, co-production, and integration between fire science and management. This tale is about the 2025 Fort Stewart research campaign: a week-long event that united researchers, administrators, and practitioners to study the same prescribed burns at the same time and work together to develop tools for the next century of wildland fire management.

In this series’ first episode, Christian is joined by Kevin Hiers, DoW SERDP/ESTCP, and Michael Falkowski, NASA FireSense, to discuss the big picture of the campaign. They explore why the U.S. Department of War and National Aeronautics and Space Administration support fire science, what goes into putting on a large-scale field campaign, and why a culture of innovation is paving the way for the future of wildland fire. All the while, you’ll be immersed right in the action with exciting, real-time audio from the field.

Learn more about collaborative research burns.

Learn about the 2022 Fort Stewart research campaign.

*Music credit: Musictown on Pixabay

Learn all about collaborative research burns with James Furman, a Fire Management Specialist with the USDA Forest Service. James currently serves as Wildland Fire Subject Matter Expert for DoD’s environmental research programs and leads an Integrated Research Management Team (IRMT) to facilitate DoD-funded collaborative prescribed fire research campaigns. In this episode we discuss best practices for co-production of wildland fire science and the collaborative research burns hosted by the IRMT, as well as their benefits and how to prepare for and overcome potential challenges.

Data collected from IRMT-hosted research burns has contributed to tools such as QUIC-Fire, BurnPro3D, and FastFuels. Learn more about these tools, how they are developed and tested, and how they can be used to improve fire management practices from the Next Generation Wildland Fire Planning Tools Workshop: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg38mXDqkgvOsRqH37uLiH-dOgxmZBwgv&si=ilgk9H_fYeA7zg8v

The recorded presentations are available on our Southern Fire Exchange YouTube channel and include:

o Wildland Fire Modeling Opportunities and Challenges - Rod Linn

o Terrestrial LIDAR Scanning: QUIC-Fire Modeling of New Jersey Wildfire - Nick Skowronski

o FastFuels: 3D Modeling for Next-Generation Fire Management - Russell Parsons

o Using QUIC-Fire to Predict Fire Effects - Joe O-Brien

o WiFIRE Commons and BurnPro3D - Ilkay Altintas

o BurnPro 3D Demonstration - Kevin Hiers

As fire managers, we have a duty to consider everyone who is going to be impacted by our actions, whether it be the neighbors adjacent to your burn or a town three counties away where the smoke is settling down. In this episode of Friends of Fire, Ludie Bond, Public Information Officer (PIO) / Wildfire Mitigation Specialist with the Florida Forest Service, imparts that “You may not be a communications professional, but you are a fire professional, you are a prescribed burn professional, and as such, communications is key to being able to have that successful prescribed burn program.” As a trusted messenger to many communities through building relationships and adaptive messaging, Ludie describes key factors to a successful communications plan that benefits the community, your work, and ecosystem restoration as a whole.

Successful Communication Plan:

1. Identify your audience[s]

This episode continues the discussion of the call-when-needed prescribed fire crew model with Adam Warwick, Stewardship Manager with The Nature Conservancy. Adam is also the creator and director of The Nature Conservancy’s Southern Blue Ridge: Call-When-Needed Fire Crew. In this episode, we discuss crew recruiting, costs and funding, partnerships, equipment needs, benefits and challenges, how to overcome challenges, accomplishments, and hopes for the future. If you are interested in starting a call-when-needed crew, check out the primer below and feel free to reach out to Adam with any questions ([email protected]).

2:15 Recruiting

Primer for the Call-When-Needed Crew

Southern Blue Ridge Fire Learning Network

Considerations for Wildlife and Fire in the Southern Blue Ridge

The Fire Managers Guide for Blue Ridge Ecozones

This episode is part one of two discussing a call-when-needed fire crew model with Adam Warwick, Stewardship Manager with The Nature Conservancy. Adam is also the creator and director of The Nature Conservancy’s Southern Blue Ridge: Call-When-Needed Fire Crew. We discuss the general design of the crew, what makes this crew unique, how to support crew cohesion, supporting diversity, and how this type of crew is helping promote acceptance and understanding of prescribed fire.

Primer for the Call-When-Needed Crew

Southern Blue Ridge Fire Learning Network

Considerations for Wildlife and Fire in the Southern Blue Ridge

The Fire Managers Guide for Blue Ridge Ecozones

This episode continues the discussion on Wild Turkeys and Prescribed Fire with Jay Cantrell and Dr. Michael Chamberlain. We discuss challenges of managing for wild turkeys, public perception of prescribed fire’s effect on turkeys, the effect of growing season / nesting season fires on turkey habitat and survival, potential effects of climate change on the bird, and the benefits and challenges of managers and researchers working together.

This is part 1 of a 2-part discussion where Jay Cantrell (Assistant Big Game Program Coordinator with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources) and Dr. Michael Chamberlain (Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia) discuss the relationship between Eastern Wild Turkeys and prescribed fire. In this episode we cover turkey population history, recent population declines and the potential causes, how to best manage for wild turkeys, and more.