CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH Geography 640-02: Seminar in Physical and Environmental Geography Spring 2019 Topic: Hazards W 7-9:45 p.m., PH1-230 Ticket #11013

Group Project

A major deliverable in this seminar is an original research project, which is to be presented at a regional professional conference. I would like the seminar to break into pairs of people with complementary skills.

While I am open to each pair formulating a project of their own design to address a topic of passionate interest to them, I am putting out the idea of having the teams address the Woolsey Fire of this fall. It has the "merits" of being quite local, of huge scale, and involving all kinds of issues that need exploration. You may be the first people to hit the ground on this academically and get your work out to the professional audience!

Some possible issues:

• Estimation of burn intensity and vegetation response, perhaps at Charmlee Park
• Post-fire succession in the plant community, perhaps at Charmlee Park or at Cheseboro Canyon, where the Biogeography Lab group has a lot of pre-fire floristic data for comparison
• Analysis of edaphic changes (carbon content, C/N ratios, fate of the mycorrhizal community)
• Analysis of post-fire mass movement episodes
• Perhaps a drone-based study of vegetation or mass movement
• Social geography of those killed, those who lost their homes, fate of homeless in the mountains
• Literature content analysis of media coverage or of city or county council/supervisors meetings
• Livestock and pet evacuation issues
• Depending on IRB, possibly oral histories or interviews with emergency responders for lessons learned
• Or???

The Camp, Tubbs, and Thomas fires raise similar issues and some unique concerns as well and might be feasibly pursued. The Tubbs fire in 2017 burned well away from the Wildfire-Urban Interface, wiping out thousands of homes in Santa Rosa. The Camp fire essentially destroyed Paradise and had unprecedented effects in Chico nearby. The social vulnerability aspects there share some of the wealthy people in the WUI issue we have down here but there was also a huge population of extremely poor and countercultural people in the area, kind of an intersection between rural fire demographics and WUI demographics. The Thomas fire killed more people through mass-wasting than the fire itself.

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Last revision: 01/22/19