David R. Weise

I am conducting research on the mechanisms of fire behavior in live fuels with a team composed primarily of university collaborators and students at Brigham Young University and the University of Alabama at Huntsville and scientists in the RMRS Fire, Fuels and Smoke Program. The objectives of this research are to improve understanding of the relative importance of several factors such as chemical composition and water content, heat transfer modes and fluxes (convection and radiation), fuel particle geometry and fuel bed arrangement on pre-ignition and ignition processes and on subsequent fire spread within and between live shrub fuels. A DOD project funded in 2016 involving over 15 scientists will be studying the effects of heat transfer on pyrolysis and ignition of southern live fuels (https://www.serdp-estcp.org/Program-Areas/Resource-Conservation-and-Climate-Change/Air-Quality/RC-2640/RC-2640). Fire spread in chaparral fuels is being examined at three scales – the fuel element, the fuel bed, and in the field through a combination of experimentation and modeling. I am testing and validating laboratory scale results in field settings wherein the conditions are much less controlled and the fuel beds are more complex in live fuels such as chaparral, sagebrush and forests with shrub understories. An important aspect of the testing includes evaluation of existing fire behavior models such as WFDS and BEHAVE using experimental data.

My entire research career has been focussed on prescribed burning ranging from fire effects to my more recent focus on fire behavior and smoke.

Effective use of prescribed burning requires both an understanding of fire behavior and the associated ecological effects. We must understand the important factors which govern fire behavior in living vegetation, an understudied research area, in order to model and predict fire behavior in these important fuel types.