Wildfire scientists at the University of Alberta are mapping out hazardous fuel to anticipate where fires are likely to burn and which communities are most at risk.
“The idea being, if you can anticipate where fires are going to happen, you can be better prepared, you can respond better,” said Jen Beverly, an assistant professor of wildland fire.
Beverly says traditional risk maps used more unpredictable factors like ignitions and weather.
“I can’t tell you where lightning is going to strike,” she said. “It’s also really tough to predict the weather and what it’s going to be in any one location.”
But this latest model uses one of the only factors she says can be relied on with certainty: fuel.
“Fuel is mapped, so vegetation can be mapped using remote sensing. It can be mapped with inventory, aerial photography, and it’s fairly reliable and doesn’t change very much day to day like weather does,” Beverly explained.
“Fires are contagious and in order to continue to spread, they need to preheat adjacent fuel and transmit themselves to that adjacent fuel and they do that with heat transfer — that’s just fundamental combustion process — and we know the distance over which that can happen.
“If you have two patches of fuel and they’re close together, then it’s fairly straightforward for the fire to then spread and continue to grow by moving from patch to patch.”
Using geographic information systems, the Wildfire Analytics Team looks at where those fuels are and where those patches are connected.
“We also look at how the connected patches are orientated in relation to communities — the built environment.”
Some populated communities might have no fuel or be located near water, which would lower their wildfire risk. Others, Beverly says, are located in fuel pathways that would channel fire toward the town or city.
“If the winds are forecast on a given day to be from the south, we can identify right now which communities have pathways that would enable a fire to spread from the south into the built environment,” she said. “It’s a way to kind of isolate which communities are vulnerable day to day during the fire season.”
“You might have a community with really limited roads out and if those roads happen to fall, or even one of those roads happens to fall within a pathway in for the fire, then this creates a pretty unique vulnerability around evacuations,” Beverly added.
The team ran the model for about 900 communities in Alberta that are populated to some extent.
“We were able to ask our counterparts at Alberta Wildfire which communities they had particular concerns about. They gave us a list and we were able to send over the maps.”
Nordegg, Hinton and Jasper are at the top of the list when it comes to wildfire risk, Beverly said.
The team has shared the data and images with communities, hoping it will help them plan proactive fuel removal, containment lines or alternative and supplementary evacuation processes.
“We are currently working with a number of communities in Alberta and B.C. right now to run these assessments and have some discussions with local fire experts as well as the municipal fire department … what these assessments are showing us and get their feedback on whether it’s consistent to what they understand and if it’s useful to them,” Beverly said.
She said the data is easy to interpret and update and it’s more accessible for communities that don’t have a lot of money to hire consultants to complete fire risk assessments. Ultimately, Beverly hopes the data will be made available to anyone for free online.
“We’ve designed it to be very understandable. It’s simple to update from year to year as the fuel should change. It’s really easy to run, it’s cost-effective – we can make these maps in minutes. These kinds of assessments are the way we need to go in terms of managing the risks,” she said.
“We cannot predict when and where these sorts of perfect storms are going to play out. You need to have an ignition in the right place, oriented with the wind, along the pathway where the fuels can carry it and that’s a really tough thing to ever predict. But you can identify where it’s possible and that means you can plan for it.”
Beverly said it’s been an extremely busy wildfire season in Alberta already and the team hasn’t had the chance yet to compare its assessments with the May fires that forced thousands of Albertans out of their homes. They plan to take a look, she said, and see if their assessments were useful.
“We were making these snap(shots) available to Alberta Wildfire for operational use. Obviously, it’s just one piece of information and it’s still early research we want to confirm is accurate. But generally, it looked pretty good.”
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