WISCONSIN – On Dec. 6, Northern Research Station Research Forester Nick Skowronski and his research team received news that they had received a 2021 Project of the Year Award from the Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program for their research on wildfire combustion processes. The project, Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes in open-canopied forests using coupled and iteratively informed laboratory-, field-, and model-based approaches, was one of only four projects to receive the award this year.  

The SERDP Project of the Year award honors significant research and demonstration achievements in addressing the Department of Defense’s environmental challenges. The Department of Defense has facilities throughout the United States where low-intensity prescribed fire is used to manage hazardous fuels, restore ecological function and historic fire regimes and encourage the recovery of threatened and endangered species in the forests they manage. However, current predictive models used to predict fire behavior during low-intensity fires fail to adequately predict fire outcomes because they do not consider variability in fuel characteristics and interactions with important meteorological variables.  

The objectives of the awarded research include improved understanding of processes driving heat transfer, determining how fuel consumption is affected by spatial variability in fuel particle type, fuel moisture status and other factors, assess effects of multi-scale atmospheric dynamics on fire spread, and ensure measurements taken support development and validation of physics-based fire behavior models. The research results have enhanced our understanding of combustion processes in wildland fuels and improved our ability to accurately predict fire behavior under a wide range of management scenarios to achieve desired outcomes.

The research was formulated and executed by a strong team of Forest Service scientists and staff in addition to co-investigators at the University of Edinburgh, Michigan State University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology and Korea University; in partnership with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. The Forest Service team included Research Meteorologist Warren Heilman, Research Meteorologist Jay Charney, Research Forester Ken Clark, Research Ecologist Mike Gallagher, Meteorologist Xindi Bian, Biological Science Technician Matt Patterson and GIS Data Services Specialist Jason Cole of the Northern Research Station, in addition to Skowronski.

Example of a 10 x 10 m experimental burn in the New Jersey Pinelands being intensively measured with a variety of sensors at multiple horizontal and vertical positions. USDA Forest Service photo by Nicholas Skowronski.