We all watched the news in horror last January as acres of California burned. Wildfire is increasingly becoming a problem in the East, too. You might remember the fires in New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks in 2024.
A new project to study fire in the East received a $1.74 M grant by the National Science Foundation in partnership with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Erica Smithwick, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of geography at Penn State and director of its Climate Consortium said the effort hopes to set a research agenda for understanding eastern wildfire risks and impacts. Smithwick is the principal investigator for the new Eastern Fire Network (EFNet), which includes five partner institutions. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Smithwick about the initial three year project.
LISTEN to the conversation
Kara Holsopple: How have conditions changed in the East so that studying wildfire has become necessary or more necessary?
Erica Smithwick: What we’ve seen over the past few years in particular is that we are not immune to the risks of wildfire in the Eastern United States. Of course, we had the smoke events of a few years ago that made us realize that wildfire is near.
The fires in Canada and California that seemed very far away got us thinking, would those risks potentially start to increase here in the East? Following on the heels of that smoke event, we started to see some droughts over the last few years, especially in the late summer and fall, which is our fire season in the Eastern United States. We’re starting to see that those conditions are becoming more frequent and maybe longer and more severe. That’s part of the research that is to be done. But the question is, will those risks increase into the future?
Kara Holsopple: What are the particular wildfire threats and risks that we have here in the East?
Erica Smithwick: Really that’s an open question. The interesting part of fire in the East is that we don’t think of ourselves as being very risk-prone. But we do have a fire season or seasons, I should say. We have increasing fire risks in the spring and the fall. We call those the shoulder seasons. That’s when our leaves have fallen to the ground and get more solar insulation onto the forest floor. And in the right conditions, if you have enough drought, you can get fire risk. That depends on the fuel types. It depends what kind of forest you’re in. Some forest types are more conducive to wildfires and others are less conducive. But the question is, how frequent are those weather conditions going to be in the future, those drought events? And where on the landscape are we likely to see those hotspots?
Kara Holsopple: How will this group interact with Western experts?
Erica Smithwick: One of the things we’re trying to do with our project is to get ahead of fire risk in the East and to learn from the West, lessons learned about how they’ve coped with increasing fire risk, both with the ecological questions and the wildfire management questions and the community-based questions about how you live with wildfire. We’re starting to think about how you get ahead of the curve in the East. And how we can use our project to work with fire managers and researchers and scientists in the West to try to foreshadow those changes.
Kara Holsopple: I read that this effort will take a transdisciplinary approach. What would that look like? Can you give me some examples?
Erica Smithwick: It’s jargony, right? Transdisciplinary. So let me break it down. Really what it means is we’re bringing together experts from different fields of knowledge, and those could be social scientists, natural scientists, climatologists, and we’re bringing them together to try to understand what the research questions are. That’s the interdisciplinary part.
But transdisciplinary research means we’re also trying to co-design those research questions with land managers, with practitioners, with decision-makers, with community members, so that our research is more useful. So a transdisciplinary approach really starts with the questions that are going to be most relevant to the landscape itself that we’re trying to manage and understand. And then we bring those interdisciplinary experts to bear on those questions.
Kara Holsopple: What’s the geographical area you’re looking at?
Erica Smithwick: Technically, we’re looking at Regions 8 and 9 of the U.S. Forest Service, but that is east of the Mississippi, essentially. We’re looking from Florida to Maine. So this is a huge gradient, biophysical gradient, social gradient, fire history gradient, a lot of heterogeneity and vegetation, and different climatic regions.
Kara Holsopple: When you said heterogeneous, you mean there are different types of trees?
Erica Smithwick: Yes, there’s variability. That’s what heterogeneous means, is variability in the types of vegetation that we see on the landscape. So with 100 years, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and New England area, not having fire on the landscape, we’ve started to see some trees come into the understory that are really not used to fire. They don’t burn well, if you will. And those fire types are quite extensive across many parts of New England and the Mid Atlantic.
But we also have pockets of vegetation that do have a historical relationship with fire and have, we think, burned quite extensively in the past. Those are our oaks, our pine systems, and they actually require fire to regenerate. So you have this interesting heterogeneity, this variability in the types of forests across the landscape, and they have different relationships with fire. What we’re trying to do is build that into our planning. Will these forests even burn? Are these the vegetation types that New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South has actually grown up with as they have evolved, and how might these shift in the future?
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Kara Holsopple: What are some of the other questions you’re hoping to answer or raise about fires?
Erica Smithwick: One of the things we’re really interested in is how we think about wildfire risk as a system. It’s not just a question about drought and the fuels and ignitions. It’s a question of how we live with fire. And that’s a really human question. It’s a question about how we’re planning our landscapes that we live in, our communities. It’s planning for those risks of the future. It’s not having one way in, one way out kind- of-zoning or road systems, so that if there is an emergency, we are prepared for it.
It’s thinking about how people are going to start to see smoke in the atmosphere, but not because of a wildfire, because of the managed controlled burn that land managers are putting on the landscape to minimize risk. And if people aren’t aware of that, they could be quite alarmed if they see smoke in the sky, because that’s not something we’re used to in the East in many areas, at least in the Northeast.
So how do we think about changing hearts and minds around what fire is and how we live with it? That’s a social science question. And some of my work to date and work with other colleagues that led to this project has really helped us understand that not every community is the same. People have different relationships and they bring different things to their understanding. of fire.
Kara Holsopple: Here in the East, we live very close to one another. It’s very different from a Western landscape.
Erica Smithwick: Not only do we live very close to each other, we also have a lot of infrastructure and even a small fire could cause a lot of impact to that infrastructure and to our homes. That’s a big factor here in the East. Another really interesting fact about the Eastern United States is that we have more people living in fire prone environments than in the West. We call that the Wildland Urban Interface, which has a cute acronym called the WUI. And The WUI is more extensive in the East than it is in the West.
We think of these calamitous events – and there are extremely calamitous events – that have happened in the past with our Western wildfires. These are huge wildfires that cover thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres in some cases and are burning increasingly fast and increasingly more severe and increasingly in urban environments, as we saw with L.A. and in Hawaii in Lahaina.
In the East, hopefully we don’t have fires like that. We’re unlikely to because of variability in fuels that I was thinking about earlier, but the risks could be even greater to those homes and to those communities because of how tightly packed we are, because of where we’re living. We have let, for good reason, and there’s obviously lots of benefits of having lots of forests in the Eastern United States. It has carbon sequestration, which mitigates against climate change effects, biodiversity, watershed protection. I’m a forest ecologist. I love forests. But we have to recognize that along with that also comes some risks. And one of those risks potentially increasingly could be from wildfire.
Erica Smithwick, Ph.D., is distinguished professor of geography in Penn State’s Department of Geography and principal investigator for the new Eastern Fire Network (EFNet).
