Why do houses burn in wildfires and what can we do about it?

Yana Valachovic is the County Director – Forest Advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties and a member of UC ANR’s Fire Network with specialty in community resilience and the built environment. Yana is passionate about finding solutions to challenging problems bringing her skills in forestry, natural resources and sociological research, design and mitigation of the built environment for wildfire resilience, as well as her years rooted in County government and community engagement. She is a member of the Governor’s Wildfire Forest Resilience Task Force and other state fire policy workgroups. She is the co-lead of the Northern California region of the California Fire Science Consortium and is a founding member of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council. She has co-authored papers on fire behavior in California forests and the intersection of fire performance in home and landscape design.  She is active in California policy development and has been a technical resource for bioenergy, forest management, home hardening, and improvements to defensible space legislation. She will share a vision for adaptation and is keenly interested in helping communities adapt to wildfire.