Increased wildfire activity has raised concerns among communities about how to assess and prepare for this threat. There is a need for wildfire hazard assessment approaches that capture local variability to inform decisions, produce results understood by the public, and are updatable in a timely manner. In this article, Schmidt and her co-authors describe how, in partnership with wildfire practitioners and communities, they created a tool that rapidly assesses wildfire hazards and is easily modified to help identify and prioritize mitigation activities.
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In this paper we modified an existing landcover dataset to better identify vegetation associated with wildfire and permafrost in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Whitehorse over the past 4 decades (1984-2014) and make predictions for the next 4 decades (2024-2054). We used an existing fire model called FlamMap and several statistical analyses to determine where future fires could be possible.
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Many communities are developing ways of evaluating local well-being. Research shows that when local governments ask residents to take part in determining measures of well-being, the public is more likely to get involved in decision-making, and communities have more influence over resource management.
Kent Spiers, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary and a former research associate at ISER, compared how communities in Alaska and Yukon evaluate local well-being.