Dr. Jennifer Balch - Our changing fire regimes
Overview
There are three ingredients needed for fire: fuel to burn, hot & dry conditions, and an ignition source. People are changing all three. The number of wildfires and the area burned has increased over the past several decades, in western U.S. forests by 1500%. We’ve seen some of the most expensive wildfire seasons in the U.S. in just the past five years, costing over $16B. We need to learn to live with fire, again. But how? Ultimately, we need to burn better and build better.
Bio
Dr. Jennifer Balch is the Director of NSF’s newest data synthesis center, the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab (ESIIL), at the University of Colorado-Boulder. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and a CIRES Fellow. Dr. Balch’s research aims to understand the patterns and processes that underlie disturbance and ecosystem recovery, particularly how people are shifting fire regimes and the consequences. Her work spans from temperate regions to the tropics and leverages big data from satellites to social media. She has conducted research in the field of fire ecology for over twenty years, and has lit a few experimental burns to understand the consequences of altered fire regimes.