The Alaska Fire Science Consortium announces a webinar entitled "Historic and Future Flammability in Alaskan Boreal Forests and Tundra Ecosystems." It will be held Wednesday, 20 March 2013 at 1:00-2:00 p.m. AKDT, and the target audience includes fire managers, resource managers, students, and scientists.
The webinar will be presented by Adam Young, at PhD student in the Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho. Young's current research is focused on how climate and vegetation influence fire occurrence at multi-decadal time scales in Alaskan boreal forest and tundra ecosystems. Worldwide fire regimes are expected to shift as a result of climate change. Predicting when, where, and how these fire regime changes will occur requires an understanding of the climatic controls of fire at differing temporal and spatial scales. This research uses past climate-fire relationships to predict 21st-century fire regime changes across Alaskan boreal forest and tundra ecosystems at a range of temporal and spatial scales, providing insight into when, where, and how future fire regimes may change.
Background information is available in a 2012 poster entitled 'Quantifying the historic and future distribution of fire in Alaskan tundra ecosystems,' by Young, Adam M.; Higuera, Philip E.; Duffy, Paul A.; and Hu, Feng Sheng. It can be downloaded at: http://tinyurl.com/Young-Poster.
For questions, please contact: Randi Jandt Email: rjandt [at] alaska.edu