October 2009

Quiroste Valley, Año Nuevo State Reserve

Through their use of fire, Native Californians once played a pivotal role in maintaining a patchwork of diverse habitats throughout the state.  Some of California’s most iconic landscapes, including the open meadows of Yosemite Valley and the rolling coastal prairie surrounding the Golden Gate, are attributed to the land management practices of local tribal people. Fire was the most important of the many tools Native Californians used to manage local ecosystems for food, medicine, and raw materials. Recently there’s been a surge of scholarly interest in the significance of Indian burning in order to reconstruct particular burning practices Native people employed, practices largely disrupted by European colonization. As early as 1793, colonial officials set out to eliminate Indian fires at the same time exotic plants and animals changed California’s fire environment. Taken together the drastic social and environmental changes of the last two centuries have clouded our understanding of the role that Indian burning played in California.

Members of the research team meet in the field

An exciting collaborative research project at Año Nuevo State Reserve is using an interdisciplinary ecological and archaeological approach to piece together the most complete picture of indigenous land management and its effects in California to date. This research is the joint effort of the Amah Mutsun Ohlone, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

Nicole Vaillant samples a fire scar

As part of this project, Chuck Striplen, a graduate student in Environmental Science, Policy & Management and an Amah Mutsun tribal member, is using fire scars to reconstruct the fire history of a prominent historic Ohlone village site and the surrounding watershed. Fire scars indicate when fires occurred, and can often reveal information about the seasonality of fires. By analyzing fire scars from trees throughout this watershed, Chuck can put together the fire regime for this area over time. Chuck’s research is being conducted in conjunction with the Fire Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley and his findings will address the seasonality, extent, severity, and frequency of fires in the Quiroste Valley. Combined with archaeological information about what food and materials the Amah Mutsun Ohlone tribe used in the past and historical landscape data from maps and photographs, Chuck’s research will shed new light on how California Indians managed and shaped their environment. In addition to its academic significance, this research will be useful to land managers throughout the state. One positive outcome of this collaboration has been the creation of California’s newest State Cultural Preserve – Quiroste Valley, encompassing the entire viewshed of the historic village – which also includes mechanisms by which the Tribe can eventually co-manage the Preserve with State Parks.

Related:

• Fire research pt. 3: Fire in space
• Fire research pt. 2: Ghanaian cookstoves
• Fire research pt. 1: Embers & ignition
• Announcing a new feature: research highlights
• A series of articles on this project are being published in News from Native California
• Visit the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band’s website
• More historical ecology of the Bay Area

The Ares rocket which will launch the Orion crew exploration vehicle into orbit. Image credit: NASA via nasa1fan/MFSC on Flickr.

Fittingly on a day when NASA successfully fired a rocket into the moon, we turn our attention to space. More specifically, we’ll be looking at fire safety in space, which is the focus of Sonia Fereres’s research. NASA’s Constellation Program aims to send people back to the moon, then to Mars and beyond. Part of this program involves the creation of a new generation of spacecraft like the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Unlike the Space Shuttles currently in operation, whose cabin environment mimics the atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration of earth at sea level, the new vehicles are designed to have lower pressure cabin environments with increased oxygen concentrations. Raising oxygen concentrations increases the risk of fire, a phenomenon that poses unique challenges and dangers on board spacecraft.

That’s where Sonia’s research comes in. For her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, she’s studying the flammability of different materials under these low pressure, high oxygen conditions. Flammability can be characterized several ways: ease of ignition, flame spread, and heat release rate, to name a few. Sonia studies the ease of ignition because the other dimensions of flammability only come into play once ignition has occurred, making it of paramount importance for fire safety.

FIST chamber

To determine the fire risk posed by these extraterrestrial conditions while remaining firmly grounded in a Berkeley laboratory, Sonia runs experiments inside a special containment chamber, the Forced Ignition and Spread Test (FIST). There, she can manipulate ambient pressure and oxygen concentration in order to compare time to ignition and sample mass loss until ignition under various conditions. This research will help establish whether reduced pressure and enriched oxygen environments pose a higher fire risk than normal atmospheric conditions, a subject of considerable interest to NASA as it develops a space program for the twenty-first century.

Related:

• Announcing  a new feature: Research highlights
• Fire research pt. 1: Embers & Ignition
• Fire research pt. 2: Ghanaian cookstoves
• Fire research pt. 4: Indigenous land management

Jason Burwen, a joint Master’s student in Public Policy and International and Area Studies, studies fire of a different sort—the fires that Sissali and Dagaare women of northern Ghana build daily to cook for their families.

Hawa Issifu cooking on an improved stove

The wood-burning cookstoves used in northern Ghana are crucial elements in local food production and culture, but they also have health and environmental impacts that make them the target for international development interventions. Wood-burning stoves contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and release particulate matter that is harmful to human health. Globally, exposure to indoor air pollution is one of the leading environmental causes of disease and one that disproportionately affects women and children. Jason was drawn to working on cookstoves because they sit at the nexus of so many different development issues: energy, environment, health, poverty, and gender. More generally, cookstoves have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners alike because small improvements in cookstove technology and use promise to have meaningful impacts on people’s lives.

A training on stove construction in Gorima

Jason’s research is part of a collaboration between UC Berkeley, the Ghanaian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and Plan Ghana that aims to share both technology and knowledge with the women in these rural communities. Together they’re distributing improved cookstoves and providing training on how to build and use these stoves. The new stoves are designed to make a better fire and to vent smoke away from the user. In a better fire the combustion of the wood is more complete, which results in a more efficient use of the energy stored in the wood and the release of less particulate matter.

Within this context, Jason is evaluating the impacts of the improved cookstoves by quantifying their health and environmental impacts using a randomized-control field trial. In the field, he measured how much wood was burned and how much carbon monoxide women were exposed to while cooking a traditional meal. He is also using temperature sensors to record stove usage patterns. With this information and data from household surveys, Jason hopes to estimate the longitudinal impact of improved stoves on women and children’s health as well as their impact on the environment. At a larger scale, Jason is interested in the fate of wood in this system that does not get burned for cooking and what role training and education plays in the adoption of new technology.  While he and his fantastic undergraduate research assistant, Richard Tam, begin the work of assembling and analyzing a substantial data set on stove and fuel usage, Jason is still appreciating the practical education in international development he gained through his experience implementing trainings in stove construction and use for hundreds of women across several north Ghanaian villages.

Related:

• A video on stove making
• Berkeley’s International Public Policy Group
• Announcing a new feature: Research highlights
• Fire research pt. 1: Embers & ignition
• Fire research pt. 3: Fire in space
• Fire research pt. 4: Indigenous land management

Each summer and fall, California burns. Many of California’s plant communities may have evolved to live with fire, but most of the state’s human communities are not especially fire-adapted. Engineering Master’s student Sarah Scott is investigating how wildland fires spread in the hopes that this knowledge can be put to use planning better wildland-urban interfaces and preventing some of the tragedies fires cause annually.

Ember tunnel

Sarah’s research examines how an ember or hot particle ignites pine needles, grasses, and other materials common in wildlands. Using a specialized small-scale wind tunnel, she tests how the size and temperature of embers and hot particles, the type of fuel bed, and wind velocity affect ignition. Above the wind tunnel, an automated lighter heats particles with a flame before dropping them onto the sample fuel material (e.g., pine needles) below. A video camera captures the interaction between these heated particles and the fuel bed, while thermocouples record its temperature.

Ultimately, the information Sarah’s research generates can be incorporated into models for predicting fire development and spread at the landscape scale. Research that begins with the interaction between a single ember and a bed of grass may someday influence the how residential developments interface with the forests, shrublands, and grasslands next door.

Related:

• Introducing a new feature: Research highlights
• Fire research pt. 2: Ghanaian cookstoves
• Fire research pt. 3: Fire in space
• Fire research pt. 4: Indigenous land management
• Combustion and Fire Processes Lab

Berkeley’s more than 10,000 graduate students make their academic homes in programs that run the gamut from African American Studies to Statistics, from German to Public Policy. With so many students and such a diversity of interests, the variety of graduate research projects on campus is staggering. This week we’re announcing a new feature: once a month we’ll report on research being done by graduate and professional students in different departments around campus that relates to a common theme.

The first theme is fire, which seems fitting for a California fall.

Each year as the summer draws to a close, thousands of Californians flock to the Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, an event that always culminates in flames. At the same time,  after months with no rain, fire danger is high across the state and wildfires are a common occurrence. These events hint at the potential scope of fire-related research agendas, which might include fire as art,  fire as ecological process, or the tools for managing fire on the ground or in the halls of government. As an introduction to the various ways Berkeley graduate students have chosen to investigate fire, the blog will present four graduate student research projects over the next four days. Tomorrow, forest fires!