This proposal addresses the sbir phase i topic area, forests and related resources - topic area 8.1. Specifically, IT aims to address the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forest…

This proposal addresses the sbir phase i topic area, forests and related resources - topic area 8.1. Specifically, IT aims to address the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forest and grasslands... [and] improve sustainability of forest resources, where new technologies are needed to enhance the protection of the nation's forested lands and forest resources and help to ensure the continued existence of healthy and productive forest ecosystems. IT addresses the program's long-term goals of achieving healthy and sustainable forest ecosystems that are more resilient to wildfires and the research priority developing technology that facilitates the management of wildfire on public lands with research that provides systems for ... Managing wildfires; systems for reducing fuel loads in forests; tools and equipment for improving the efficacy and safety of firefighters on the ground and in the air.forest management today is exceedingly complex, a key difficulty being assessing and managing uncertainty to limit risk. IT aims to mitigate the extent and impact of wildfires that are said to be becoming more unpredictable and which are often characterized by complex, uncertain behavior in steep, complex, forested terrain. This is weighed against strategic manipulation of forest fuel amount and structure using tools such as prescribed fire, which is accompanied by its own risks. For example, prescribed fires that unfolded badly include colorado's lower north fork fire, in which a prescribed fire killed a civilian, and california's lowden ranch fire, which grew to over 800 HA and destroyed 23 homes. Retrospectively, inadequate evaluation of fire and weather conditions is often cited in such cases. Uncertainty about the smoke impacts of prescribed fire also reduces its use. Mitigation now requires quantitative planning, but tools do not currently have the dynamic complexity and means to estimate confidence in predicted fire behavior, smoke, and ecological effects, especially in complex environments. To date, planning has used deterministic kinematic models – and thus ignores the potential for fire-induced winds, dynamic feedbacks, and amplification – and also uses oversimplified meteorological circulations; thus, IT can underestimate the range of possible outcomes and misinterpret the impact of management activities. The impacts of better estimating uncertainty extend to improving firefighter safety, as entrapment potential peaks when fire behavior rapidly deviates from an assumed trajectory and becomes extreme (page ET AL. 2019).this work is appropriate for a phase i sbir because IT will demonstrate the technical feasibility of the proposed framework and bring the innovation closer to commercialization by completing the fundamental research and evaluation and demonstrating outcomes in several different types of fires. The innovation involves a high degree of risk, in that our hypothesis that by introducing an uncertainty-based range of primary environmental variables to a modeling system, uncertainty in outcomes can be estimated is untested and the spread of simulations could therefore underestimate natural variability; this is a hurdle that the USDA-funded r & d is intended to overcome.