Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT MERCED
5200 N LAKE RD
MERCED,CA 953435001
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Wildfire disasters have increased rapidly across the US, resulting in hundreds of people killed and billions of dollars of economic losses. In response, governments have sought to identify every potential solution that could help reduce these losses, including improving forest health, reducing hazardous fuels, and protecting homes and neighborhoods with fire-resistant building materials and landscaping. In rural agricultural counties, however, science has largely overlooked one potential tool for mitigating wildfire losses: agriculture. Historically, places where wildfires burn into crops have only been of interest to crop insurance companies and fire behavior in different crop types is poorly understood and not modeled at all in fire prediction models. But farmers and wildland firefighters have known for decades that irrigated crops like vineyards and fruit orchards make excellent firebreaks, while the flammability of cereal grains and other dryland agriculture depends upon the crop type and how green it is. Further, the abandonment of agricultural lands and pastoral practices in parts of Europe has contributed to numerous disastrous fires in recent years, as the abandoned fields become overgrown and contribute to rapid, intense wildfire spread.The goal of this research project is to develop a system for consistently documenting fire behavior in cultivated croplands to identify which crops could be intentionally planted around homes and communities as both food and firebreaks. We will focus on four rural agricultural counties in the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho, where several destructive wildfires in summer 2024 burned across multiple crop types and destroyed dozens of home and businesses. Researchers will use participatory GIS, a method that involves interviewing farmers and volunteer firefighters from the community while looking at maps and satellite images of the landscape to identify where crops and management actions like irrigation or discing fields changed fire behavior or stopped fire advance. From these interviews, we will construct a database of crop impacts to wildfire behavior and create a replicable protocol that can be applied to future croplands by wildfire to gather more data. We will also develop educational materials to help local farmers that want to plant crops specifically for mitigating wildfire in key areas.This research will bring wildfire and agricultural scientists together to find a new solution for the wildfire crisis that works for rural agricultural communities. These rural towns are often not eligible for traditional wildfire mitigation funding that focuses on forests, but they have some of the highest wildfire risk in the western US, and often rely entirely on limited local fire suppression resources and volunteer firefighters when a wildfire breaks out. Investing in fire-resistant agriculture could be a key multi-benefit solution that not only supports small family farms and protects rural communities, but also maintains local healthy food sources and agroeconomies in places that are otherwise in danger of becoming food deserts. We plan to conduct the research that defines that solution.
Animal Health Component
60%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
20%
Applied
60%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
The long-term goal is to build a foundation for understanding the potential for rural agriculture, and particularly cultivated family farms, to provide wildfire hazard reduction benefits in addition to food.The immediate project goal is to develop a preliminary protocol and collect time-sensitive data on three fires that burned in late July through early August 2024 in the Palouse agricultural regions of Idaho and Washington.?The primary objectives of the proposed project are to:1) assess the interactions between agriculture and wildfire in rural communities recently impacted by wildfires by conducting participatory GIS interviews with landowners and collecting observations and photo points on field plots,and 2) develop and implement a protocol for rapidly assessing factors that promote resilience at the wildfire-agriculture interface.
Project Methods
Two overarching objectives correspond to each of the research questions:What time-sensitive information must be acquired post-fire?We will conduct a series of field visits within the first 90 days of the project (October-December 2024) to sites burned by the 2024 Palouse fires (Gwen, Texas, and Lower Granite) with extension agents and producers to identify the convergence of metrics that inform post-fire effects and agroecosystem damage, specifically related to soils, carbon, biodiversity, and crops. We will utilize a focus group approach to identify key metrics of concern from growers and extension agents. Next, we will integrate expert and rural knowledge using Participatory GIS to develop maps of agriculture-wildfire interactions, identifying where crops enhanced fire behavior and where they diminished it. We will draw from existing protocols designed to measure above-ground burn severity, soil burn severity, carbon pools , and crop lossto develop a rapid response field sampling protocol for agricultural lands that captures key information for scaling up with remote sensing and other geospatial modeling. We will test this field protocol and iteratively refine it with our SWCD partners to make it implementable by a wide range of skill sets to collect substantial quantities of data.In addition to field observations, we will develop a brief companion questionnaire that identifies management characteristics relevant to flammability, such as pre-fire planting density, irrigation rates, moisture levels, growth stage, intermixed cover crops, mowing rates, disking during the fire, etc. We will iteratively co-develop and test the field sampling protocol on the 2024 burned sites with a goal of completing at least 25 total plots (target size 30x30m) across the fire-affected areas (including both burned and unburned). This dataset can be used to ground truth spaceborne, multispectral, passively collected remotely sensed data-such as Sentinel (20m pixels) or Landsat (30m pixels)-and is consistent with most remotely sensed landcover products, including post-fire data collected to map wildfire burn severity across US wildlands as part of the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program.What crops enhanced or moderated fire behavior during the 2024 Palouse wildfires and why?Based on outcomes from the participatory GIS engagement and field data collection, we will summarize the general lessons learned about wildfire interactions with different crop types and management strategies. We will develop hypotheses to expand the research from these outcomes and will conduct additional meetings with the SWCDs in spring/summer 2025 to co-evolve these hypotheses and further optimize field data collection.We will utilize the field data to map fire interactions with agriculture across the four-county study region (Whitman, Asotin, Nez Perce, and Latah) for the summer 2024 fires utilizing remotely sensed data. High-resolution remotely sensed from the Planet Labs constellation of spaceborne sensors is acquired near daily for a given location, allowing for timely acquisition of clear scenes both pre-and post-fire to quantify the area affected and develop preliminary maps of agriculture-fire interactions based on the draft AgFire Severity Index. We will use a mixed methods approach that blends participatory GIS input with standard machine learning algorithm development (e.g., classification and regression trees) to produce these maps, a method that integrates local knowledge with advanced data analysis (Olsen et al. 2015).We will publish the 2024 Palouse fires outcomes both as a journal case study and as a grower-oriented extension article disseminated through University of Idaho Extension, University of California Cooperative Extension, and UC Merced Fire Resilience Center (PI Kolden is the Director). We will present preliminary findings and translate them to grower wildfire preparedness activities at the February 2025 meetings held by the SWCDs, one in each state (WA and ID). We will co-develop wildfire preparedness content with the SWCDs for their websites. We will also provide content and comments for the in-progress development of the Whitman County Community Wildfire Protection Plan.