Seminar Series: Data-Driven Wildfire Research

This seminar series explored how data science can help increase our understanding of wildfire. In recent years, wildfire has gone from an infrequent and distant news item to a centerstage isssue spanning many consecutive weeks for urban and suburban communities.

Frequent wildfires are changing everyday lives for California in numerous ways -- from public safety power shutoffs to hazardous air quality -- that seemed inconceivable as recently as 2015. Moreover, elevated wildfire risk in the western United States (and similar climates globally) is here to stay into the foreseeable future.

There is a plethora of problems that need solutions in the wildland fire arena; many of them are well suited to a data-driven approach. In this seminar series, co-sponsored by the Stanford Data Science Initiative and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment,  we heard from several Stanford researchers about how their areas of interest require a data-driven approach to find solutions to pressing wildfire problems. Each speaker presented a short 20-minute overview of a particular problem of interest, followed by a 30-minute Q&A session in hopes to create a dialog about data-driven wildland fire research.

Spring 2020-21

Mondays at 12:30pm – Seminars are held via Zoom. For log-in information contact Derek Fong at dfong@stanford.edu