Newswise — “If you live in flammable countryside, you’ve got to work with fire. You can’t make it go away,” according to wildfire expert Mark Cochrane, a senior scientist at the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence. He been has been studying the impact of wildfires for nearly two decades.
He is part of a team of scientists from Idaho, California, Utah, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Canada and Australia who support community-based approaches for mitigating and adapting to wildland fires. The group advocates moving from the notion that fires are unnatural and toward a managed approach that integrates fire research with public policy.
Cochrane can share their vision of how mankind can learn to live with wildland fires by reintegrating fire as a vital landscape process and building communities that are resilient to fire. He can be contacted via email at [email protected] or cell phone at (517) 281-8881. Cochrane has done extensive work on changing global fire danger and regional fire regimes in the United States, Indonesia, Australia and the Brazilian Amazon, focusing on how climate change and land cover and use/management affect fire occurrences.
He is also identifying which management techniques, including thinning and prescribed burns, work best in particular forests in the United States. The study focuses on 630 large wildfires that occurred in the last decade in U.S. National Forests.
RSS