On Conducting Climate Research on Wildland Fire in Alaska that is Useful for Fire Management

The emphasis on conducting actionable science research has grown over the past several decades while the understanding of how to achieve this goal is still lagging. The required processes indeed vary with each situation. Herewe outline structural and functional elements based on our specific experience in fire weather research targeting fire managers as end-users that should be broadly useful to conduct actionable science.

The iterative conversations between the climate scientists and fire management were facilitated by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium (AFSC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The AFSC is a boundary-spanning organization that understands both management needs and research interests and essentially serves as a translator between the two groups. The conversations began at the proposal-writing stage so that the researchers understood management priorities early. Once the research was funded, fire meteorologists from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center attended the research team’s regular monthly meetings, which later became biweekly. National Weather Service IMETS (Incident Meteorologist) later joined the biweekly fire weather predictability meetings. This ongoing engagement between end-users and researchers has helped guide the research and is an essential component of our success. Taking advantage of established seasonal interagency planning meetings where the broader fire management community hear about research updates helps raise awareness of the work and enables researchers to receive direct feedback. The sustained engagement has impacted the research from the questions asked to how the results are displayed.

As we face the increasing challenges from extreme events ranging from fires to floods, the need to deliver research results into the hands of operational practitioners will only grow. Therefore, it is timely to describe the necessary elements for doing actionable research.