Every wildfire season seems to be getting more intense than the last but today’s guest is here to tell us that wildfires actually have a good side. Today on Found, we’re joined by Allison Wolff () , the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet () , a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for adaptive land management. Wolff discusses why the wildfires we’re seeing today are hotter and spreading more quickly than we can contain and how proper land management can help create the environment needed for the lower, slower burning fires forrest need.
They also talked about:
• How Wolff’s previous experience working with leaders at tech giants like Facebook and Netflix helped shape her leadership style
• The importance of working with indigenous groups to learn how people have been managing the land for centuries
• The key role AI places when it comes to monitoring land management and creating adaptive planning
(0:00) Introduction
(2:07) Vibrant Planet is modernizing land management
(11:31) Adapting land management to climate change
(16:45) Scaling nature-based climate solutions
(20:16) The benefits of a for profit company
(30:00) The importance of Indigenous knowledge in land management
(35:01) Host discussion
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@michaelstohlgren9391
March 26, 2024 at 5:18 pm
Hi Allison, I usually don’t comment on these videos, however, it has come to my attention that Dr. Hugh Safford is the Chief Scientist for Vibrant Planet. For those of you who operate outside of the forest ecology world, Safford’s research is widely debunked. In fact, several peer reviewed papers have explicitly debunked and discredited his work while he was a research practitioner with the Forest Service (Baker et. al 2023 and others).
In fact, a lot of what you are saying during this interview contradicts the latest and most comprehensive studies on forest ecology and wildfire ecology. For instance, fires do not currently burn at a disproportionately high-intensity (catastrophic) levels. Mapping historical and modern fire regimes show that fires have burned in a similar mix intensity ranges, regardless of forest density.
Forest ecology and wildfire ecology has come a long way in the last decade. One of the lessons we have learned, is that natural fire is the only way to reestablish a healthy forest ecosystem. Contrary to Saffords widely debunked research, we cannot mimic fire through forest management practices. Instead, we need to allow natural fire, during our natural fire seasons, back into our ecosystems. Vibrant Planet is reestablishing outdated practices. Opening up forest lands to clear-cutting (Tahoe just re-opened their national forest lands to timber harvesting based on Vibrant Planets recommendations; they are allowing for upwards of 80% of the trees to be removed. These metrics mimic clear cutting efforts during the 80’s) . And creating perfect seedbeds for invasive and highly flammable grasses through soil disturbing thinning and mastication work.
Instead of working on stopping fire in the backcountry, where the overwhelming majority of fires take place, we need to focus on investing into home hardening retrofits and community wide defensible space. This is the only proven way to stop wildfires from becoming wildfire disasters. In fact, vegetation management outside of 100 ft. of a home does not offer any additional protections for the home in the event of a wildfire (Syphard et al. 2017; Cohen 1999). This is far more cost effective, and can be accomplished if we shift our narrative towards the science, and away from “sustainable agriculture i.e. logging under the guise of fuels management.
Finally, please reconsider who you are bringing on as a chief scientist. His name raises immediate red flags in the science community. Thanks.
@ZennExile
March 31, 2024 at 6:52 pm
Forest fires are caused by mono-culture forests that don’t contain the ecology required to process yearly waste. Forest fires are very rare in old growth forests with diverse ecology and a fully active Rhizosphere. AI can’t repair the Rhizosphere. Only the sustainable processing of organic waste back into healthy living Rhizosphere and the curation of ecological diversity can prevent forest fires. Flora and Fauna are required to break down organic waste into subsequent tiers of nutrient availability until the resulting castings and frass are a complete nutrient delivery source for the microbes that make up the bulk of terrestrial life. Those microbes then enable flora and fauna to continue growing and spreading.
So no, AI cannot prevent forest fires. Reliance on technology like this to observe surface behaviors ignores 65% of the ecosystem. And ignoring that 65% of the ecosystem is why the environment has become unstable.