Fire is an important natural disturbance in forested ecosystems around the world and serves as a critical but poorly understood link between climate change and biosphere response. In recent decades, drought, land-cover alteration, and non-native plant invasions have altered natural fire regimes at an alarming rate, and in the process threatened native biodiversity and human well-being across the planet. This interdisciplinary PIRE project focuses on similarities and contrasts in fire, climate, and land-use interactions in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. because all have experienced extreme drought, rapid land-use change and past and present devastating fires. The main research questions to be addressed in this project are: 1) To what extent are prehistoric and modern fire regimes shaped by climate, landscape and fuel arrangements, and human activities? 2) How has the well-documented warming of the late 20th century altered wildfire activity in comparison with the variability of these fire regimes at centennial and millennial time scales? 3) How does understanding the historical range of variability of wildfire activity inform decision making with respect to mitigating and adapting to climate change impacts over the next several decades? State-of-the-art field, laboratory, and modeling tools will be used to reconstruct past and current fire regimes in multiple watersheds and increase our understanding of regional and hemispheric fire-climate linkages and land-use feedbacks. Each country's personnel lend unique expertise to this interdisciplinary team of biologists, geographers, geoscientists, paleoclimatologists, and anthropologists who will draw from and integrate techniques in paleoecology, paleoclimatology, dendroecology, GIS science and remote sensing, and fire behavior modeling to examine the past and present role of fire in the biosphere. The PIRE team anticipates that such a broad and integrated approach will help provide the scientific results necessary to guide current and future fire-related land-use decisions.
The U.S. educational impacts include the training of two early-career scientists, two postdoctoral research associates, four graduate students, and 14 undergraduate students over a five year period. Educational activities range from undergraduate internships to graduate and postdoctoral fellowships, and two international scientific workshops that will provide training for students and professionals about international issues in fire science, global change, and land management. Team-taught courses, online courses and discussions, and educational materials will be developed and made available to academic institutions, government agencies, and NGOs. One unique feature of this PIRE project is the participation of young filmmakers and scientists to produce high-quality media products to extend the project's outreach to popular science and natural history web platforms. The PIRE project will team with Montana State University (MSU)'s Science and Natural History Filmmaking program, which trains science graduate students to create accurate and compelling media that communicate STEM disciplines to the public. Podcasts of WildFIRE PIRE research and discoveries will be available through the project's webpage as well as via MSU's award-winning science and natural history website TERRA: The Nature of Our World. An MFA student in the program and an undergraduate intern will gain valuable field-based experience planning, directing, and producing mini-documentary podcasts describing and reporting on the PIRE project's fire research and science.
Institutional impacts of the project include strengthening international collaborations among partners and linkages to the global fire science community. The project's research addresses national priorities in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand concerning climate change, fire, ecosystem management, and sustaining native biodiversity. It will also enhance and contribute to international fire programs, including International Geosphere Biosphere Program Cross-Project Fire Initiative and Core Program Activities; the UK-based Global Paleofire Working Group; and NOAA's International Multi-proxy Paleofire Database to study fire globally. In addition, including undergraduates from across the country, including from tribal colleges, in the overseas field research and outreach experiences will help the U.S. institutions recruit and retain a diverse and globally engaged cadre of undergraduates. At a state level, the project supports university efforts to build partnerships with communities, businesses, state government and other educational entities that will help align science education and research with pressing social and economic challenges within the state.
Results of the project will provide: (1) a better understanding of the direct and indirect role of humans, climate, and fire feedbacks on ecosystem processes that operate at different temporal and spatial scales; (2) information on the historical range of variability of fire conditions necessary to assess current fire activity, risk and hazard in different settings, relative to that of the late 20th century; (3) development of new approaches that link historical with modern fire science and empirical with modeled reconstructions; and (4) training for current and future international fire scientists.
The U.S. institutions partnering in this project include Montana State University at Bozeman, the University of Idaho, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the USDA Forest Service's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory (MT). The Australia partners are the University of Tasmania and Australian National University. The New Zealand partners are Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research and the University of Auckland.
This project is co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Earth Sciences, the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, the Division of Environmental Biology, the Division of Human Resource Development (Tribal Colleges and Universities Program) and the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings.
