Identifying Key Watershed Stewards in the American West
The American Forest Foundation (AFF) approached SIG to support their work on ensuring forests on private lands in the American West continue to provide clean water, even in the face of increasing wildfire activity. In particular, they wanted to find out the role played by family forest owners in ensuring watershed health.
Planning And Implementing Fuel Treatments To Reduce Fire Hazard And Restore Healthy Wildlands And Forest Communities
California landowners, land managers, and planners are acutely aware of their region’s exposure to wildfire and its associated hazards. Local, state, and federal efforts to moderate fire behavior with fuel treatments have dramatically expanded as wildfires have increased in size, severity, and community impacts.
What Communities Can Do To Improve Their Wildfire Resilience
After visiting conferences throughout the last year, SIG-NAL’s Executive Director, Graham Wesolowski details his experiences initiating a Regional Wildfire Mitigation program:
Predicting The Future Of Wildfires? It’s Complicated
This week, many large media platforms ran front-page or lead stories on the launch of Fire Factor, a new wildfire prediction tool by First Street Foundation that lets property owners look up their predicted wildfire risk based on address.
With Biomass Energy, The Carbon Savings Are In the Details
Biomass energy, Michael Moore’s new documentary Planet of the Humans faces criticism from environmentalists for using outdated data and simplistic analyses on renewables.
Preventing California’s Catastrophic Wildfires Requires Careful Forest Management
In 2015, the world experienced the strongest El Niño year on record, and forest fires tore through homes, businesses and lives in many parts of the world – one of which was California. That year 150,000 acres burned in the state, costing over USD $1 billion in insurance claims.
For Indonesia’s Wildfires, There Are No Easy Solutions
This week, we’re blogging about SIG’s work on reducing wildfire impacts in Indonesia and California. Fires in both regions have similar financial and health impacts, but differ in behavior. In Indonesia, even the ground itself can burn, requiring unique management approaches. Lessons learned in each place can inform solutions in the other.
SIG Provides Local Fire Management Training In Sumatra, Indonesia
Brett Shields and Dr Chris Mallek conducted a 5 day fire training course on behalf of the US Forest Service and Burung Indonesia at the Harapan Rainforest site in Jambi, Sumatra (Indonesia). Brett is SIG’s Director for Asia Pacific and Chris is a SIG affiliate with our Natural Hazards team.
Wildfire Most Important Factor In Carbon-Payback Period For Forest Biomass Energy Projects
SIG co-developed software to remotely monitor gold mining activity in Colombia. Illegal mining is a driver of deforestation and this project aims to empower authorities to respond quickly and appropriately. CoMiMo, which is available for desktop in both English and Spanish, uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to identify threatened areas.
