DANIEL FOSTER

Like wildfires, prescribed burns create smoke. In a project at UC Berkeley's Blodgett Experimental Forest, we're teaming up with atmospheric scientists to study how much smoke prescribed fires produce and how the chemical composition of that smoke depends on forest structure. We're combining some cutting-edge drone-based atmospheric samples with the novel fuels sampling protocol I've developed for the Pyregence project... As a member of the Pyregence Consortium, I am designing novel methods of sampling wildland fuels. The methods we are piloting today will provide data to drive the next generation of fire models, improving our ability to understand and predict how fires will spread. Pyregence-related work makes up the first two chapters of my dissertation. Photo credit: USFS Region 5