Alan Ager

USFS

“Conflicts and Opportunities for Restoring Fire Adapted Forests in the Western US National Forests”

Alan Ager is a research forester at the USDA Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, MT.  Dr. Ager received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in forest genetics and studied the genecology of red alder in the Pacific Northwest.  He began a career with the Forest Service as a landscape modeler and worked on a wide range of natural resource problems.  In the last 10 years he shifted his focus to wildfire and now conducts research on wildfire risk management and modeling alternative future forest management scenarios with agent-based models.  Most recently Ager combined simulation modeling with network analysis to disentangle wildfire risk transmission among federal, state, and private lands, and map national forest lands that are likely to spawn large fires with potential to burn WUI areas.  In a recent paper, Ager teamed up with social scientists to explore socio-ecological systems approach to improve wildfire mitigation planning.  They demonstrated scale mismatches in the current US community wildfire protection planning resulting from poor integration of social and biophysical factors that predict risk and risk perception.  In other recent work, Ager has developed the use of spatial optimization and production possibility frontiers to understand tradeoffs among ecosystem services expected from restoration programs on western national forests.  He developed several spatial planning systems that are widely used by Forest Service planners and by researchers interested in wildfire modeling and risk assessment.  He has conducted workshops on wildfire simulation and risk analysis throughout the western US and Mediterranean region.