Since 2017, a multidisciplinary fire research campaign incorporating diverse data sources and research themes has been carried out in the context of management prescribed burns at the Nature Conservancy’s SycanMarsh Preserve, located in south central Oregon featuring grasslands, dry ponderosa pine forests and unique wetland habitats. Now in its third year, with over 5,000 acres burned and substantial research data collected, this ongoing collaboration between the Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy, and numerous partners is gaining momentum. The primary objectives of this effort have been to test and develop new methods for fuels mapping and to develop integrated fuels, weather and fire datasets for model evaluation purposes. Data collection has included UAS, fixed wing thermal imagery, field fuels sampling, weather stations, and measurements of different aspects of fire behavior, fire effects and emissions. Model evaluation efforts focus primarily on physics based fire models but datasets should be comparable with other models as well. This presentation will provide an overview of different burns and data collected to date (2017-2019), highlight some of the interesting topics that have arisen so far, and discuss future directions. We hope that other researchers may be interested in joining this project as time goes on.

This seminar was presented for the 2019-2020 Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory Seminar Series.