August 25, 2026: Breakout topic #2

Group A

Weather indices are different from those in the west - do they work here?

 How do we define risk/what does risk mean?

• It might be based on local perceptions and needs and values
• What is needed to evaluate that?

Understanding the lower atmosphere might be important, especially for smoke

• Thought it might be stability, but at that time(?) they didn’t have the tools to understand lower atmosphere stability enough to better understand where smoke will go with a fire

Better fuel models & fuels mapping

• More refined to a localized to the landscape across fuel types
• Often built on really old fire spread models, 58 models for the US; might be too coarse a model
  • Often calculate too fast a rate of spread because drawn from the west and transferred to the east
• FIA could improve models by adding some additional data to improve this knowledge
  • But, might not help as much with non-forest landscapes
  • Some regions do collect/consider non-forest landscapes, but depends a bit on the manager of that region and what they think is important to include in FIA data collection
• Learning the decay influence could be important over the geographical gradient and forest type
  • Derecho in MN saw increased fire 5 yrs after the event because of fuels becoming more prone to fire; boreal forest type 

Designing studies need to get assist/engagement from managers

• sometimes they are asked to do things that need a research collection that they might not have time to do. The collaboration will help create a research and more practical output.
• More of a feedback loop on the research (on improved models, for example, by who is using it)
  • Some folks in the field might not be as willing to share knowledge of what they know, have learned, are curious about; technology might not enough to inform the model
  • And also, the managers in this group are concerned that some fire folks are in the habits & patterns from historical understanding;
    • Would be good to find ways of getting new information into the management community (like health impacts more, would be good)

Health:

• Understanding pfas in blood
• Understanding impact of particulate matter

On the social side of things, what about political?

• “How does fire on the ground differ by state policy and liability?”
  • Better follow up on burn permits after they are applied
  • Need to better collect and centralize the data to make it more easily accessible
  • There are public needs/wants, but managers might be restricted by policy & liability issues
• Improve the lack of consistent occurrence data;
  • Might not collected fuel treatment and prescribed fire data (refine the information collected on prescribed fires)

Capacity - how do we increase capacity for things like fuel mapping

• How do we increase incorporation of new technology (drones, on-ground autonomous vehicles)
• How can we improve monitoring after fire?
  • How can we monitor better?

Ecology Issues

• Influence & management of invasive species
  • Like, what is the temperature threshold needed to kill buckthorn?
• Seasonality of burn

It would be worth looking into for the prescribed fire councils and prescribed burn associations in other regions

• There are some naturalist groups wanting to burn; managers hear about it and like the energy - how do you capture that energy and interest?
• Are the prescribed fire councils effective in their education?
• How are fire councils developed and then sustained? They seem to blink out over time

Education?

• North Carolina holds a Fire Festival (6-7 others in FLA, and also in AL and GA)
  • Virtual Reality of fires feels very realistic; how do we build capacity to employ VR
• How do we get these people from the south to help educate in the north?
• How can we generate interest on the importance of fire outside of the south?

Group B

Climate

• How is climate changing in the east?
  • Richard mentioned that tree-ring data is showing increased precipitation is occurring in the Fall, and we have no idea why.
• Many Fire Weather Indices don’t work well in the eastern US
  • Often borrowed from the Western US
  • How can we develop fire weather indices specific to the east?
• Long term trends in wind speed data are quite limited as well.
• How does changing climate affect wildfire risk, mitigation, etc.

Fuels

• How are invasive species changing and spreading, and how does it affect wildfire behavior, spread, and regimes? How do these species respond to fire?
• How can we bridge the northeast and the southeast?
  • The eastern US contains vastly different ecosystems, and fire behaves differently across these ecosystems
• What is the seasonality of fuels?
• What are thresholds for different species, different regions?
• How do fuels react at different climatic conditions?

Fire Data

• Current wildfire data is quite limited.
  • MTBS is only for large wildfires (>1000 acres in the West, and >500 acres in the East)
  • FOD dataset is limited
  • Across state lines, there is huge variability
• How to bridge the gap between federal and local data collection.
• Improved wildfire modeling research
• What are the historical long-term trends across larger timescales, like across centuries?

Fire Effects

• What large-scale ecological and geological processes does fire affect?
  • Water quality, carbon, riparian systems, smoke.
• How does rainfall after a wildfire event affect flooding, landslides, etc.?
• How do hurricanes impact wildfire events in the East?
  • Does large downed woody debris act as a fire barrier in some conditions and increase fire spread in other conditions?
• How does fire affect insect occurrence and visa versa?
  • Spongy Moth, emerald ash bore, etc.

Insurance

• How will insurance be handled in the future?
• How would an effective insurance market look like that facilitates the reintroduction of fire?
  • Will there be a national wildfire insurance program
  • Home owner insurance vs prescribed fire insurance
  • What is working and isn’t working in California and how can we apply that to the East?
  • Will firewise communities receive an insurance break?

Prescribed Fire

• How can we incentivize prescribed fire in the east?
• What are the social impacts of prescribed fire on your neighbors (nuisance value)?
• What would an increase in prescribed fire do to air quality?
  • How does that impact public perception?
  • In California, greater impact from wildfire has driven more prescribed fire?
• We need better prescribed fire data.
  • It’s difficult to get actual total acres burned for prescribed burns.
• What is the impact of agricultural burning?

Public Health

• What are the health impacts on firefighters, the general population, etc.?
  • Many firefighters have to end their careers because of smoke exposure.

Suppression

• Why do certain wildfires escape suppression?
• What is the success of initial attacks?
• How do suppression efforts affect wildfire size, probability of structure damage and destruction?
• What variables are driving failed suppression? (jurisdictional, travel time, availability)

How can the eastern US communicate and collaborate with other countries and regions with similar wildfire problems?

Group C

• Definable target conditions - For public land management upper tributary watersheds longitidinal to define desired, undesired, target conditions.
• State wide fuel model map - typing not on species level - really important because most lands in PA are private and most wildfires on private lands. So how can you do risk modeling and analysis for wildfire suppression if
  • Better mapping of fuels and better fuel models for PA
  • Vegetation layers
  • Lidar - understory fuels in the fall
• Links between canopy and understory vegetation layers
• UAS based hyperspectral data for species classification
• Spectral unmixing to do species mapping at landscape level
• Where there were historic fires where did some burn and some did not?
• ODEN system out west (AI drone based approach)?
• Soil types can be helpful given that they shape vegetation type.
• What are the thresholds for flammability for fuel types and vegetation types. How do you identify them when you haven’t had much fire yet?
• How do you define economic counterfactual scenarios and how do you measure the cost of land use change when it goes in higher risk locations to the public?
  • Its been done in the West
• Corners crossing challenges where mc mansions are breaking up public lands which fractures ability to manage lands. How do you set acquisition priorities. There should be a cost of acquisition that is subsided by current WUI members. State buys the lands at super high prices because past development has driven prices up.
  • The land price spread akin to fire spread.
• In the southeast, conservation developers sell small lots but with large green space in the middle but they are notified before purchasing that it will be burned
• Suppression responsibility on public and private land still falls on the state in PA
• Wind is what screws decision making for prescribed fire and suppression.
  • Makes it really hard for identifying decision making thresholds and operations thresholds e.g., air vs ground suppression.
• SE is just not that windy that’s perhaps played a big role?
• PA has local squirrly winds and also macroscale transverse winds
• Better wind models for training tools for wind impacts on certain topographies and certain level of lifts
• 25 mph drones stop at 30mph choppers go down
• Wind and RH
• Adding wind to fire danger model
• Terrain plays a huge role in suppression ability
• NY DEC has some aerial assets but few but fog in high places like ADK makes it difficult to fly.
• Invasive species and influence on fire and whether you can predict change in vegetation type over coming decades.
  • Mile a minute Persicaria perfoliata
• Bump in the road species (rattle snakes) lead to high level of precautionary principle lead to constraints on ecosystem level management
• Relate fire prescriptions to a suite of species but not get so snowed in on a single species.
• What about fire refugia in the east and how wildlife uses burned habitats and corridors. How can you do little harm and learn something?
• Makes it hard to get one burn done let alone more than one burn.
• Ignition strategy is important don’t ring your wildlife.
• You can create a very patchy burn by burning on the edge of your prescription
• Patchiness is hard to document what you actually did
  • Hard for emissions quantification
  • What about severity of fire?
  • Used jackpot fuels to create more variation in severity of fires in barren environments
  • Don’t get to perfectionist because you are so far down the line of completely losing ecosystem types.
  • Set the table with mechanical action and assisted migration
• Understanding the effects of fire regimes on driving ecosystems in particular directions
• Seasonal fire has huge impact.
• Public perceptions and priorities research questions?
  • What’s taught in curriculum at the college level?
  • “I wish every state had what TT provided the EF-NET fellows”
  • Marrying practitioners and researchers to knowledge exchange
  • There need to be clear pathways from research to practitioners.
• Manager researcher relationships
• How do different educational approaches work? Outside in the woods vs death by power point.
• Get kids at the k-8 level and introduce them to good fire.
• Carbon from grassland dynamics and recovery and what forms it goes into (into bugs/herbivores for example) versus plants? Question informed by moth data in barrens (biodiversity and biomass per species).
• Forests as carbon sinks is a huge focus in PA Aboveground carbon storage vs belowground carbon storage in grassland
• Massive push in the last 7 years on carbon sequestration. PA state forests are valued for lots of things recreational value, aesthetic values, bio rich reserve, bioreserve for state and globally listed species. Like ruffed grouse which is almost extinct on the Michaeu, they are pushed alot for more old growth forests reserves by people that are worried about climate change and climate mitigation. Ecosystem scale work for landscape mosaic to achieve multiple objectives. State politics
• Education on photosynthesis
• Organic soils then there is real problems.
• We organized our discussion around six major themes.
  
  • Fuels and vegetation mapping. The group identified a real data gap here — Pennsylvania lacks a statewide fuel model map at the species level, which matters enormously because most PA land is private, and most wildfires happen on private land. You can't do meaningful risk modeling or suppression planning without better fuels data. Specific needs raised: linking canopy and understory vegetation layers, using LiDAR to capture understory fuels in fall, and UAS-based hyperspectral imaging with spectral unmixing for landscape-level species classification. Soil type came up too, since it shapes vegetation type and could be a useful proxy layer. There was interest in the West's drone-based AI approaches — the "ODEN" system — as a possible model.
  • Fire history and flammability thresholds. A core open question: for areas that haven't burned much, how do you even identify flammability thresholds for different fuel and vegetation types? The group also flagged the value of going back to historic fire footprints to understand why some areas burned and others didn't within the same event.
  • Land use economics and the wildland-urban interface. This was a rich vein of discussion. The group wants better tools for defining economic counterfactuals — what does it actually cost the public when development pushes into higher-risk locations? This has been done in the West but not here. A specific PA problem: large parcels get broken into smaller "corners-crossing" developments — essentially McMansions fragmenting public land — which undermines land management capacity. That raises a policy question about acquisition priorities and whether the state ends up subsidizing inflated land prices that past development itself created. Someone offered a nice analogy: land price spread behaves a bit like fire spread. There was also a Southeast example worth noting — conservation developers there sell small lots around large shared green space, but buyers are notified up front that the green space will be periodically burned. That's a governance model worth studying.
  • Wind and suppression operations. Wind was called out as the single biggest wildcard for prescribed fire and suppression decision-making. Pennsylvania has both local, squirrelly terrain-driven winds and larger transverse macroscale winds, which complicates setting clear operational thresholds — for instance, drones are grounded around 25 mph, helicopters around 30. There's real interest in better wind modeling tied to specific topographies, and in incorporating wind more directly into fire danger models alongside relative humidity. Terrain more broadly limits suppression capacity — NY DEC's aerial assets are limited, and fog in high terrain like the Adirondacks often grounds them. Someone raised the open question of whether the Southeast's relative lack of wind is actually a major reason prescribed fire has scaled more successfully there than it might in PA.
  • Invasive species, wildlife, and burn management. Mile-a-minute (Persicaria perfoliata) came up as a specific invasive concern, alongside the broader question of how invasives will interact with and potentially reshape vegetation and fire behavior over coming decades. There's tension between single-species precaution — rattlesnakes were the example given — and ecosystem-level fire management; the group felt fire prescriptions should be built around a suite of species rather than getting locked in on one. On fire refugia: how do eastern wildlife species actually use burned habitat and corridors, and can burn planning do "low harm, high learning" experiments? Practically, ignition strategy matters a lot — burning on the edge of a prescription can create useful patchiness, but that patchiness is hard to document and complicates emissions quantification. On severity, one useful technique mentioned was using "jackpot fuels" to intentionally create variation in fire severity in barrens environments. The general ethos here: don't over-optimize for perfection when some ecosystem types are already at risk of being lost — better to set the table with mechanical treatment and assisted migration and keep moving.
  • Carbon dynamics. There's an open research question about where carbon goes in grassland recovery — into soil, into plants, or into the food web via insects and herbivores, informed by moth biodiversity and biomass data from barrens systems. More broadly, PA state forests are under real institutional pressure as carbon sinks, with a strong push over the last seven years toward carbon sequestration — alongside competing values like recreation, aesthetics, and biodiversity reserves for species like ruffed grouse, which is nearly extirpated from areas like the Michaux.
  • Education and research-practice connectivity. The group emphasized that there's no consistent pipeline from research into practice — better manager-researcher relationships are needed, along with clearer pathways generally. One fellow specifically praised the model used by Tall Timbers' EF-NET fellowship as something worth replicating more broadly. There was interest in comparing educational approaches — hands-on, in-the-woods learning versus lecture-based instruction — and a call to introduce K-8 students to the concept of "good fire" early on.