Moving prescribed fire science forwards at the Athens Prescribed Fire Science Laboratory

Prescribed fires are distinct from wildfires. They are ignited under very specific weather conditions by trained personnel as part of a management plan. These fires consume dead wood and vegetation that would otherwise fuel hotter fires. Prescribed fires can reduce hazardous fuels, and they are also essential for the health of fire-dependent ecosystems.

The Athens Prescribed Fire Science Laboratory of the USDA Forest Service is the country’s only facility of its kind – it is a mesoscale combustion facility dedicated to advancing prescribed fire science. It is part of the Southern Research Station and was finished in 2020 at the SRS Forestry Sciences Laboratory on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.

Joseph O’Brien is a research ecologist and project leader at the SRS Disturbance and Prescribed Fire Laboratory. He is also part of formal and informal networks connecting fire scientists and wildland fire management experts. These collaborations have been underway for years, and span agencies as well as ecoregions. The Eastern Innovation Landscape Network is one example.

“There are two faces of wildland fire,” says O’Brien. “It can be both a tragic problem that leads to loss of life, property and ecosystem health, but also an opportunity since it is an essential process that can reduce societal risk and enhance ecological integrity. We are focused on finding ways to build more opportunities to apply prescribed as safely and efficiently as possible.”

The facility allows the team to make new discoveries about the basic physics of fire behavior, spread, and smoke. With that information, along with other data including huge amounts collected during campaigns that bring multiple agencies together to burn thousands of acres, the team is creating and improving reliable, science-based tools to streamline prescribed fire planning and wildfire management. These tools are grounded in management needs and co-developed and tested with partners.

Making prescribed fires safer is a goal that brings participants together.

“Fire is not only a problem to be suppressed. In many forests, it is a solution to be ignited. Prescribed fire offers an opportunity to both address the wildfire crisis and improve forest health proactively,” says O’Brien.

The team has already developed impressive tools for planning prescribed fires. For example, QUIC-Fire is the first coupled fire-atmosphere model that can generate fire predictions from a laptop computer rather than a supercomputer. Scott Goodrick, a center director at the Southern Research Station, led the development of QUIC-Fire. QUIC-Fire’s developers recently organized themselves into a modeling hub for advanced forest and fire technology.

“Our goal is for the fire behavior outputs of QUIC-Fire to simultaneously generate predictions about smoke and fire effects on ecology and fuels. The aim is to support scenario testing for all aspects of prescribed fire decision making. QUIC-Fire can also act as a training tool to better understand the mechanisms driving fire behavior through a fluid dynamics lens. Prescribed fire managers are intuitive fluid dynamicists in that they alter their ignitions to shepherd winds to modify fire behavior and achieve their goals. QUIC-Fire can be used to identify and demonstrate those mechanisms and move towards an explicit understanding of fire-atmosphere interactions that can accelerate learning,” says O’Brien.

The team has also made the burn prioritization model accessible, developed protocols for terrestrial laser scanning for fuels inventory, and contributed to many other tools and models such as the Burn Opportunity Index and QUIC-Smoke.

Partners at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Department of Defense, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Lab, the University of Georgia and other organizations are indispensable to this work. Even more important are the people who will be using the research. Their needs and assessments of the functionality of the tools are guiding every step of development.