Industry Moving Wildland Fire Science Forward – Growing Capacities and Collaborations among Private Companies, Universities, and Government Agencies

Research and regulations have historically been the primary drivers of progress in understanding wildland fire behavior and smoke effects; however, industry has been pushing the field more in the last few years as an increase in severe weather has led to more lawsuits with unprecedented impacts to businesses. One example of this phenomenon was the loss of a major portion of the grape crop at wineries along the west coast of the United States in 2020 due to wildfire smoke after a record-breaking fire season. Smoke impacts to grapes, also known as “smoke taint,” are increasing the number of insurance claims from the wine industry.

Vineyards and wineries whose grapes were exposed to smoky air adjusted their practices to salvage as much fruit as possible, and winemakers began testing new fermentation processes to attempt to offset the effects of smoke taint. Scientists from the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Washington State University, the University of California at Davis, and Oregon State University have also started conducting additional research in a smoke chamber to test methods to help prevent smoke taint. There have even been attempts at developing a smoke exposure index for smoke taint; however, the science is lacking and continuously evolving.

While the science surrounding smoke impacts on crops is advancing, the current lack of published, peer-reviewed science surrounding this topic means that research is being conducted simultaneously at universities, as part of litigation cases, and by private companies seeking to push the science forward. This represents a change to the normal model where research is conducted in an academic setting and then disseminated to other sectors. Across a wide range of industries, we see growing collaboration and capacity-building efforts like those outlined above. In the wildland fire arena, multi-disciplinary partnerships and open-source models and public data sets are more important now than they were a decade ago, and the private sector has more to gain by funding research to advance the state-of-science even if doing so does not have an immediate and tractable benefit to business. In this presentation, we will discuss lessons learned from our direct collaboration on questions and concerns related to wildfires with universities, law firms, private companies, and government agencies. We will provide key examples of using open-source models and data to address problems collaboratively and share observations on what the future holds for multi-disciplinary partnerships.