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Abstract

As wildfire disasters increase globally, to the average person it can feel like the world is always on fire, with no escape. Meanwhile, ecologists and land managers struggle to increase the restorative, beneficial fire that facilitates ecological resilience across fire-adapted ecosystems. Here, I focus on lessons learned from ecology that can be applied more broadly to socioecological systems to increase fire resilience across complex systems. I connect global wildfire trends and events to the challenges faced in California and the western US, and highlight how we can better adapt western socioecological systems to live with fire using lessons from fire-evolved landscapes.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Crystal Kolden is the Director of the Fire-Climate Center and an Associate Professor in the Management of Complex Systems department at University of California, Merced. She has an MS from University of Nevada, Reno and a PhD from Clark University, both in Geography. After a brief stint as a wildland firefighter and a fire ecologist with USFS and USGS, she has spent her academic career researching how fire interacts with and impacts the human-environment system across spatiotemporal scales. She also runs the Pyrogeography Lab at UCM, which currently seeks to understand how socioecological systems can mitigate and recover from wildfire disasters.

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