This award will provide partial support for an AGU Chapman Conference on post-wildfire runoff and erosion to be held in Estes Park, Colorado in August, 2013. The conference will bring together a multidisciplinary group of researchers, students through senior scientists, working in post-wildfire and erosion response as well as fire-behavior, meso-scale meteorology, soil science, hydrology, geomorphology, and modeling. The conference will have five sessions: post-wildfire response domains; precipitation; infiltration; runoff; soil and sediment erosion and transport. Outcomes from the conference include a pre-conference review paper of current priority research issues facing the post-wildfire community; an AGU monograph of invited and submitted papers; and journal publications on proposed solutions for priority research issues of each topic session. The conference will have strong participation from students and early career researchers.
, AGU Chapman Conference The American Geophysical Union hosted a Chapman Conference to bring together a broad spectrum of the scientific community to discuss and propose resolutions for current research issues confronting the post-wildfire research community regarding post-wildfire runoff and erosion. The five day meeting was held as Estes Park, Colorado from 25-31 August 2013. This conference brought together researchers (from different countries representing a variety of scientific disciplines) who have had infrequent opportunities and insufficient time to synthesize the different post-wildfire responses. Additionally, for the first time, meteorologists were invited to help address some of the persistent research issues. This conference built communication bridges between fields, assessed how to overcome existing limitations of wildfire-response research, and suggests methods to best incorporate existing and future empirically-based knowledge into useful predictive models of post-wildfire response. The four processes of precipitation, infiltration, runoff, and sediment transport were the themes used to generate the key invited speakers and focused discussions. Background and Purpose The purpose of this conference was to bring together a broad spectrum of the scientific community to discuss and propose resolutions for current research issues confronting the post-wildfire research and mitigation community regarding post-wildfire runoff and erosion, and to explore ways to integrate the complex nature of post-wildfire responses. For example, as we expanded our knowledge of the interactions of changing climate regimes with meso-scale (~1-10 km2), short-duration and highly variable precipitation patterns that drive post-wildfire responses in mountainous forest regions, by rethinking our approach to predicting rainfall amounts and intensities within the models. Models and supporting publications describing process-based, stochastic, or statistical models of post-wildfire processes (Robichaud et al., 2006, 2007; Cannon et al., 2010a) have emerged over the last few years (for example, ERMiT funded by JFSP). Although these models represent major advances in the domain of post-wildfire process prediction, their application often is spatially-limited. The conference gathered field-, modeling- and application-oriented scientists from across the world representing the wildfire impact community. This conference built communication bridges between fields, assessed overcoming existing limitations of wildfire-response research, and determined how to best incorporate existing and future empirically-based knowledge into useful predictive models of post-wildfire response. To achieve truly unified predictive models of post-wildfire processes, the four processes of precipitation, infiltration, runoff, and sediment transport were themes that followed throughout the conference. J. Moody, P. Robichaud, R. Shakesby, D. Martin, and S. Cannon organized the Conference, which included ample time for topical sub-meetings related to disciplinary and newly emerging research issues. Conference Sponsors and Acknowledgements include the Joint Fire Science Program Decagon Devices USGS Rocky Mountain Research Station National Science Foundation Nature Conservancy American Geophysical Union. Note: Information for this report was contributed from a report on the conference authored by Peter Robichaud, Rocky Mount Research Station, U.S. Foreset Service, Moscow, Idaho.
