Colloquium - Kevin Granville (DSAS)
Speaker: Dr. Kevin Granville (Postdoctoral Associate DSAS)
Title: Examining the Impact of Prevention Efforts on Industrial Forestry Caused Wildland Fires in Ontario
Abstract: Wildland fire prevention and mitigation is of joint interest to both government and the forest industry. In 1989, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) introduced the Woods Modification Guidelines which provided rules concerning how forestry operations should be modified based on local fire danger conditions. These guidelines were replaced by the Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol (MIOP) in 2008, which among other things, has the goal of allowing forestry operations to be done safely for as long as possible as the fire danger increases. Prior to now, the impact of MIOP has never been formally analysed. In this talk, I will discuss the results of our investigation on the impacts of these sets of regulations on the frequency and severity of industrial forestry (IDF) fires. We find through a case-crossover study that there is no evidence to suggest that MIOP's greater flexibility in operating hours has increased the probability of igniting IDF fires. In a separate analysis, we find evidence of improvements in the final size distribution of IDF fires having estimated discovery sizes below 1 ha, which represent the majority of IDF fires. Overall, we are able to conclude that MIOP has resulted in a reduction in the risk of IDF fires.
Synopsis of the speaker: Kevin Granville has just begun his second year working as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Western Ontario in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences. Kevin previously studied at the University of Waterloo, where he completed both a Master’s in Actuarial Science as well as a PhD in Statistics, defending his thesis in the summer of 2019. Kevin specialized in researching queueing theory during his PhD and he is now working in data science as a Postdoc. As a member of Western’s Wildland Fire Science Laboratory, his current research focuses on industrial forestry fire risk and prevention.
