Practice of Science Friday: How To Make Fire Science More Useful in the Real World

There’s much talk of what people need to do to live with fire, but so far I haven’t seen many social scientists quoted in the press, even though I know they have developed a substantial body of literature on the subject. In my digging into this, I ran across this workshop report from a National Academy workshop. “Living with Fire: State of the Science around Fire-Adapted Communities.” National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. A Century of Wildland Fire Research: Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Kevin Hiers, a fire scientist at Tall Timbers, wrote this section and I agree with many of his ideas. I even think that many are applicable outside of fire science. I’ve bolded a few of his statements.

Fire scientists are a diverse group as well and come from disciplines as varied as meteorology, physics, forestry, ecology, and, increasingly, the social sciences. In an attempt to be relevant, fire scientists often are tool-focused and recommendation-focused so that they can tell managers how to better manage their land. The unintended consequence is that decision space is often constrained in this increasingly complex world. When mistakes are made by quantifying the obvious rather than focusing on what managers need to know, little science is translated into management actions.

Because Hiers has spent much of his career on this border between fire science and fire management, he emphasized a few characteristics that are important barriers to overcome. First, managers rely on experience as the currency of credibility. This experiential learning is different from structured learning. The scientific community, with its incentive to publish papers, has dialogs and arguments in the peer-reviewed literature; however, that conversation does not always translate well to on-the-ground experience. Second, managers have specific circumstances to deal with—the fire of the day that has a particular set of management objectives, topography of fuels, and atmospheric conditions—whereas scientists seek generality in their world view. Generalization changes scientists’ understanding of managers’ risks. Third, the complexity in fire management versus the orientation of fire science around specific disciplines increases the challenge of applying science to management. For example, when a prescribed fire is set in the WUI, the manager’s job is on the line and he or she has to integrate all of the different disciplines of fire science into that day’s burn. As fire scientists dive deeper into the depths of particular disciplines, the ability of managers to integrate the findings of research from these different areas of expertise and apply them to a specific burn becomes more and more difficult.

A different approach is needed. First, translational fire science, which is process-oriented not tool-focused, is needed. Hiers posited that solutions to the United States’ fire problem will come from long-term, shared experiences where scientists are on the fires with managers, providing the circumstances for each group to become fluent with the other. Second, fire science outcomes must begin to address uncertainty, he said, rather than what is already known, and focus on fires that can be controlled, like prescribed burns. Even for prescribed burning in the Southeast, tools are still needed to develop objectives and prescription parameters. Third, the disciplinary breadth of fire science needs to be expanded to social scientists. Many of the solutions discussed at the workshop were outside of the traditional realm of fire science expertise. Hiers commented how important it was to have social scientists present at the workshop and how their participation in fire science and management is absolutely critical. More incentives need to be provided for social scientists to participate in and contribute to solutions.

Many building blocks exist for moving toward this new approach, including prescribed fire councils, regional fire exchanges through the Joint Fire Science Program, and the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium. Hiers emphasized that when managers and scientists burn and manage fires together, they learn together. One of the premier National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center courses is an agency administrator course, which brings the line officers into a context where they see what managers face every day. Shared experiences like the one provided in the course are key, but such mentorship programs are lacking. Formal adoption of shared experience as a strategy has yet to occur, and agency leadership is needed to provide incentives for scientists to participate in an experiential way.

In my words:
Splinterizing disciplines leaving managers to synthesize in real time
Scientists rewarded for generalization, people encounter specific situations
Lack of shared experiences- real world experiential and discussion opportunities between scientists and managers
Management involves people ergo social science is critical

2 thoughts on “Practice of Science Friday: How To Make Fire Science More Useful in the Real World”

  1. Good points all. But I think we need clearer, more emphatic, statements that transferring what’s learned at one site to another site elsewhere requires very careful analysis of both sites. Too often, for example, what’s published for, say, the east slope of the Coast Range is just copied from reports based on the east slope of the Cascades. Two more different coniferous forest ecosystems can be found, but it’s not easy!

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  2. I’d suggest (without a lot of personal experience) that there are two different “real worlds,” with different “management actions.” One is strategic planning, where social science is important in determining values at risk that would become a goal for protection (or fire use), which is where this discussion makes more sense to me. When it gets to the tactical stage of how to achieve the goal on a “specific burn,” I could see the emphasis being on the appropriate fire-science based tool more than on social science. (It’s not my impression that incident commanders hold public meetings to get advice from the public on how to fight the fire, but should they?)

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