Sustainability Scholar- Prioritizing Wildfire Risk Assessments in the City of Edmonton’s Natural Areas

Using the City of Edmonton’s Wildfire Risk Modelling analysis completed by a UofA PhD student in 2021, the Scholar will review the results to further validate and prioritize areas. The project will examine the various risk outcomes specifically for the City of Edmonton’s River Valley and Ravine System, as well as other natural areas, and will build a prioritization structure that will be applied to areas whose assessments returned high risk ratings. Field data collection will be required to validate both the fire risk modelling assessment, and the LiDAR used to build the model. This will include field work collecting forestry data such as tree species and height, as well as fire risk data such as slope and fuel loading. The prioritization structure will then be used to determine fire risk assessment priorities over the next 5 years to aid in building a Wildland-Urban Interface Wildfire Risk Strategy for the City of Edmonton.

Faculty Supervisor:

Robert Summers

Student:

Partner:

City of Edmonton

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services; Public administration

University:

University of Alberta

Program: