Tag: Wildfire

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Generational Landscape Change: Montana and Madrid

It’a been out for a while (so there are several reviews available ) but I only just got and started reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse (How societies choose to fail or survive). I’ve only read the first part (Modern Montana) so far, but already I’ve come across several parallels between the socio-economic changes, and their potential ecological impacts, occuring in the landscapes under Montana’s Big Sky and Madrid’s Sun-Blessed Skies.

The broad similarity between the change Diamond describes in Montana and that occurring in my PhD study area (SPA 56, an EU protection area for endangered bird species to the west of Madrid, Spain) is the shift from an economy and landscape driven by agricultural activity to one driven by recreational activities. Such a shift reflects both the differing visions of multiple stakeholders within these landscapes, but also generational changes in attitude between older inhabitants and their children and grandchildren. In Montana’s Bitteroot Valley larger macroeconomic changes nationally and internationally have made previously profitable extractive industries (forestry, mining and agriculture) largely unsustainable economically. This has come about as land is now valued not according to resource and agricultural production but according to real-estate potential for incoming retirees, second-homers and tourists. Incoming (usually older) ‘out-of-staters’ arrive to enjoy the outdoor recreation (fishing, hiking, etc.), beauty and lifestyle opportunities, replacing the younger generation of Montanans going the other way to seek modern urban lifestyle opportunities and lifestyles;


“It’s a wonderful lifestyle to get up before dawn and see the sunrise, to watch fly hawks overhead, and to see deer jump through your hay field to avoid your haying equipment. … Occasionally I get up at 3 AM and work until 10 AM. This isn’t a 9 to 5 job. But none of our children will sign up for being a farmer if it is 3 AM to 10 PM every day.”
Dairy Farmer, Montana

Locals in SPA 56 have expressed similar feelings and ideas when I have visited over the last few years. Younger generations that would have previously continued the family farm that has passed through generation upon generation of farmers, are now seeking out employment in construction and service sectors to secure what is understood as a more ‘modern’ lifestyle. A lifestyle that affords leisure time at specified times of the week and at regular intervals (i.e. the weekends and paid holidays);


“Most farmers are part-time, maintaining the tradition agriculture. The children or grandchildren of those [farmers] do not have interest [in agriculture] because is it not profitable and requires a lot of dedication. The youths go or they seek other work.”
Local Development Official, Madrid (2006)

In Montana, Diamond describes the conflicts that have arisen between existing inhabitants and the new-comers, each with differing world-views, priorities and values. For example, contrast the attitudes of the third generation dairy farmer fighting to ensure the survival of his farm in the global economy vs. the lady who complained to him when she got manure on her white running shoes. Of course, these multiple perspectives within the landscape are inevitable in a changing world and tools and strategies must be found and employed to ensure appropriate decisions and compromises are made. In my simulation model of agricultural decision-making I have attempted to represent the influence of two differing world-views on landscape change (as have other modellers). I have termed the representative agents ‘commercial’ and ‘traditional’; the former behaving as a perfectly rational actor (in economic terms), the latter designed to reflect the importance of traditional cultural values in land-use decision-making;


“Whoever has a vineyard nowadays is like a gardener… they like to keep it, even if they lose money. They maintain vineyards because they have done it all their life and they like it, even having to pay for it. If owners were looking for profitability there would be not a singe vineyard… People here grow wine because of a matter of feeling, love for the land…”
Vinter, Madrid (2005)

As the primary thesis of his book Diamond highlights, for both contemporary and historical societies, the impacts of social, economic and technological change on the physical environment, and the sustainability of those changes. Of the several issues of concern in Montana, those related to forestry and water availability are likely to be of most concern in SPA 56. One particular interest of my PhD thesis is the importance of changes in the landscape for wildfire regimes, which Diamond discusses with reference to previous management strategies of the Unites States Forest Service (USFS). Commercial forestry has not been a widespread activity in SPA 56, the nature and human history of Mediterranean ecosystems restricting contemporary timber productivity. However, the problems of increased fuel loads due to the fire suppression policies of the USFS during the 20th century may be beginning to present themselves in SPA 56. If the agricultural sector continues to decline due to the social and economic trends just outlined, farmland will (continue to) be abanoned or converted to recreational uses (for example, hunting reservations). In turn this will leading to increased biomass and fuel loads in the landscape. As yet the consequences of such change on the frequency and magnitude of fires in the region is unclear due to spatial relationships and feedbacks between vegetation growth and burning. In the very near future the results of my simulation model will be able shed some light on this aspect of the region’s changing landscape and ecology.

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Diamond Reviews
GristMill
Ecological Economics
Futures

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Critical Mass and Metaphor Models

Bruce Edmonds has reviewed Phillip Ball’s 2005 book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another for the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). Providing a popular science account of the history the development of sociophysics and abstract social simulation the book (apparently – I haven’t read it) makes the common mistake of conflating models and their results for the systems they have been built to represent. In Edmonds’ words:

In all of this the book is quite careful as to matters of fact – in detail all its statements are cautiously worded and filled with subtle caveats. However its broad message is very different, implying that abstract physics-style models have been successful at identifying some general laws and tendencies in social phenomena. It does this in two ways: firstly, by slipping between statements about the behaviour of the models and statements about the target social phenomena, so that it is able to make definite pronouncements and establish the success and relevance of its approach; and secondly, by implying that it is as well-validated as any established physics model but, in fact, only establishing that the models can be used as sophisticated analogies – ways of thinking about social phenomena. The book particularly makes play of analogies with the phase transitions observed in fluids since this was the author’s area of expertise.

This book is by no means unique in making these kinds of conflation – they are rife within the world of social simulation.

(from Edmonds 2006, JASSS)

And not only within social simulation. In a previous paper, I highlighted with some colleagues that the name given to the ‘Forest Fire Cellular Automata’ made famous by Per Bak and colleagues, is better treated as a metaphor than an accurate representation of the dynamics of a real world forest fire (Millington et al 2006). This may be a seemingly an obvious point to make, but simulation models can provide an unjustified sense of verisimilitude and the appearance of the reproduction of complex empirical systems’ behaviour by simple models can lead to the false conclusion that those simple mechanisms are the cause of the observed complexity.

In a forthcoming paper with Dr. George Perry in a special issue of Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, we discuss the lure of these ‘metaphor models’ and other issues regarding the approaches to spatial modelling of succession-disturbance dynamics in terrestrial ecological systems. I’ll keep you posted on the paper’s progress…

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Fire-Fighting Strategy Software

Some guys at the University of Granada, Spain, have developed software for managing wildfire-fighting efforts. SIADEX is designed to speed decision-making for resource allocation, as an article in New Scientist describes:

“Computerised maps are already used by people in charge of managing the fire-fighting effort. These maps are used to plan which areas to focus on and which resources to deploy, such as fire engines, planes and helicopters.

But working out the details of such a plan involves coordinating thousands of people, hundreds of vehicles and many other resources. SIADEX is able to help by rapidly weighing up different variables.
Shift patterns

For example, it calculates which fire engines could reach an area first, where aircraft could be used, and even how to organise the shift patterns of individual fire fighters. It then very quickly produces several different detailed plans. … One plan might be the cheapest, another the fastest, and a third the least complicated.”

I wonder how Normal Maclean would have felt about this approach to fire-fighting. I imagine like me he’d be interested in how this new tool can be used to aid and protect wildland fire-fighters, but the given the unpredictability of fire behaviour (in the light of current understanding) would still maintain that human experience, gained over many years dealing with unique situations, will be invaluable in managing fire-fighters and their resources. As with much computer software, this should remain as a tool to aid human decision-making, not replace it.

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Millington 2006 Book Chapter

I’ve just received the offprint from the book chapter I wrote with George Perry and Bruce Malamud and have posted it on my website.

MILLINGTON, J.D.A, Perry, G.L.W. and Malamud, B.D. (2006) Models, data and mechanisms: quantifying wildfire regimes In: Cello G. & Malamud B. D. (Eds.) Fractal Analysis for Natural Hazards. Geological Society, London, Special Publications

Abstract
The quantification of wildfire regimes, especially the relationship between the frequency with which events occur and their size, is of particular interest to both ecologists and wildfire managers. Recent studies in cellular automata (CA) and the fractal nature of the frequency–area relationship they produce has led some authors to ask whether the power-law frequency–area statistics seen in the CA might also be present in empirical wildfire data. Here, we outline the history of the debate regarding the statistical wildfire frequency–area models suggested by the CA and their confrontation with empirical data. In particular, the extent to which the utility of these approaches is dependent on being placed in the context of self-organized criticality (SOC) is examined. We also consider some of the other heavy-tailed statistical distributions used to describe these data. Taking a broadly ecological perspective we suggest that this debate needs to take more interest in the mechanisms underlying the observed power-law (or other) statistics. From this perspective, future studies utilizing the techniques associated with CA and statistical physics will be better able to contribute to the understanding of ecological processes and systems.

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tanfastic

I just saw an advert, the strap line of which was “Holiday memories can fade fast, but your tan needn’t”

What? If your memories fade faster than your tan it sounds like you had a pretty boring holiday to me…

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Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Book Review

I expect I was wheeling my bike through the tourists, guzzling on my choco-milk after a session in the gym. Those book stalls under Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank get me everytime. This one must have jumped at me, out of the titles and authors streaming by, me the fly.

I’m sure it was because I’d read Norman Maclean before – A River Runs Through It, the story of Montana fly-fishing. But the title also intrigued me; Young Men and Fire. It wasn’t until I’d parted with my £3.50 and began reading just recently that I really discovered how intrigued I would become.

Other reviews will offer you a
better description of the story and more evocative excerpts, but I’ll concentrate less on the story and more on the storytelling. The story is the events of 5th August 1949 when 12 USFS smokejumpers died on a fire in Mann Gulch, Montana, and Maclean’s exploits to understand the tragic events years later. The telling is part story, part history,part science.

“Historical questions the storyteller must face, although in a place of his own choosing, but his most immediate question as he faces new material is always, Will anything strange or wonderful happen here? The rights and wrongs come later and likewise the scientific know how.”

The first third of the book is the story of the tragedy. It’s only later that the detective story begins, where we start “… examining how all the little cockeyed things all fit together to explain one big cockeyed thing”. This is where Maclean begins to suggest that not only did the events of the day happen because ‘everything was just right’ but that the route to discovering what happened also depends on everything being ‘just right’. The process of discovering is often as historically contingent as the history.

Maclean describes his ‘ah-ha!’ moment, his ‘eureka!’, when he thought “that’s funny”. On a boat trying to piece the bits of puzzle together in his mind of how and why those men got caught by the fire, he sees a wave on the water ‘going the wrong way’. Or rather, going in a direction he wasn’t expecting because of the winds that come and go.

Wind is the whip of the fire, spurring it on, pointing the way. The winds on the day of the fire all came together at the right time across the unique topography of the gulch to cause a ‘blowup’, an explosion of fire throwing flames tens of metres high and accelerating fire spread to speeds faster than a man can run. Faster even than a man running for his life.

Everything that had to fit that day did fit that day – but the evidence of those conditions may still be observed in the broader patterns of the landscape that are shaped by the prevailing winds. Processes acting at different rates and extents leave their evidence at different rates and extents. Maclean saw those patterns one day by chance and thought “that’s funny”.

So just as the tragedy was dependent upon “everything fitting together”, so too is the path or route to discovery? The patterns are there but they must coincide with our observation for us to understand? Or is this just the way we tell the story of discovery, linearizing the complex web of our thought processes? How can we know what subconscious links are being made when we think “that’s funny”? Or is the most important skill knowing when “that’s funny” really is funny?

The scientist in the storytelling is Richard C. Rothermel, he of mathematical fire modelling fame. Maclean asks for Rothermel’s help to use his mathematical models to plot the race between the young men and fire on the axes of distance and time. Maclean seems reasonably confident with results of the model – the numbers seem to fit with his qualitative understanding of the events. But he’s not totally convinced by the numbers alone. Just as fire requires the triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen, the events and his understanding of them require story, history and science;

“We are beyond where arithmetic can explain what was happening in the piece of nature that had been the head of Mann Gulch … Near the end of many tragedies it seems right that there should be moments when the story stops and looks back for something it left behind and finds it and finds it because of the things it learned, as it were, by having lived through the story.”

Young Men and Fire is quintessentially ‘Direction not Destination’. The route to discovery is important. The modelling is as important as the model. Hindsight is a wonderful thing because of contingency and history. But hindsight is also painful; it allows us to understand the tragedies that befell the young, who could not see it until it was upon them.

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Maclean, N (1992) Young Men and Fire Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0226500624

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Fanning the Flames

Two articles caught my eye today, (one in Science and the other in PNAS) both suggesting future climates are going to send the world up in flames (or drown it in seawater, or starve it of rainwater).

Westerling et al. find that changes in the timing of snowpack melt in the mountains of the western US, due to changes in climate, has led to an increased number of wildfires and a higher large-fire frequency across the period 1970 – 2003. They suggest this is due to a longer fire season (i.e. spring snow-melt is occuring earler in the year and the onset of winter freezing is occurring later) and that, generally, wildfire regimes at broad scales across this region are more senstive to climate change than human land-use histories.

I find this interesting for two reasons:

  1. In work I’ve done with others we found that for a similar time period (1970 – 2000) and across similar broad space scales there was no significant change in the frequency-area distribution of wildfire through time (i.e. decadal scale). I’d like to extend on this empirical work and examine causal factors as Westerling et al. have
  2. I plan to examine the influence of both land-use and climate change on wildfire regimes using the simulation model I’m currently working; it will be interesting to see which I find is more important…

Today I was also thinking about the importance of vegetation flammability on the frequency-area scaling of wildfires in a region. Which is most important;

  1. total flammability of all vegetation in a region (related to broad scale climate)
  2. distributed of risk between different vegetation species (composition of the landscape)
  3. spatial distribution of risk across a landscape (configuration of the landscape)?

Something to examine with a CA model in the future maybe…

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Fire Ignition by Arson

It seems many of the fires that have been burning in Spain recently have been caused by arson. Unfortunately this isn’t uncommon in Spain (or the Med as a whole) where over 95% of fires are human-caused (indirectly or directly).

So, how do we account for this in any model of wildfire regimes? Regarding the location of ignition, is arson more likely near or far from other human activity? What is the frequency of arson ignitions in a region linked to? Economic conditions? High levels of land tenure fragmentation (and therefore more borders across which farmers might conflict)?

As always there’s much work to do on these questions. In large part, accurate assessment of arson ignitions is likely to be dependent upon psychological understanding as much as anything else. For me, I’ll concentrate on the potential influence of increased tourism in rural areas and the consequent ‘accidental’ ignitions.

More fire pictures

Update: More comments on this blog post have been posted here