Photo: Daniel Schimoler '16 and Dr. Chris Labosier use statistics to recognize climate's impact on wildfires.
Brother Daniel Schimoler (Iota Lambda/Longwood 2016), was recently featured in a university article for his work in the PRISM program. Kelly Jones, Assistant Editor of The Rattle, spoke with Schimoler about his summer research work.
How did you become involved in the PRISM program?
During the fall semester of 2014, I had been conducting research with Dr. Kathy Gee, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, on rain water harvesting systems and really enjoyed the process of research. Towards the end of the same semester, I had started looking for internships and knew that another Brother, Nick Carrara (2015), had been involved with PRISM research in the past. I inquired about the internship from Dr. Labosier, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, whom I have been working with this summer. He told me that he was looking for a student to work with and gave me a rundown of the project he would be working on. From there, I applied and got the position!
Could you explain what your research involves? Are you taking the climate data and trying to predict how wildfires will react under specific climatic changes? Or are you just looking at what has happened in the past and trying to understand what the climate had to do with what the fire’s results? How do you turn this data into a number? What do the numbers tell you?
The official title of our research is “Spatial Patterns of US Wildfires along Biophysical Gradients”. What we are doing is selecting national forests across the country, and then using fire data from those national forests to see if there are any relationships with climate and population factors and how they affect the spatial distribution of wildfire. These factors include precipitation variability, mean annual precipitation, mean annual temperature, and population of the counties contained in the borders of the national forests. Our study period is from 1970-2014 meaning that you would be correct in saying that we are looking at what has happened in the past and trying to understand how wildfires have been affected by the climate and population variables. Knowing these relationship will also help to understand how wildfire may behave under future climates but there is no specific prediction element to our study.
The data collected comes in the form of huge data sets as you could imagine from 44 years of daily weather observations. To process the large amount of information we have to calculate representative numbers to run in our statistical analyses. To do this we used a software program called Matlab. The numbers tell us particular climatic conditions of the national forests.
Daily precipitation variability had the strongest relationship with both ignition density and area burned meaning that forests with more variable precipitation tend to exhibit higher levels of burning. Locations with more variable precipitation regimes will experience more consecutive dry days. This presents conditions that are conducive to burning. Spatial patterns were also uncovered though this study. National forests in the western US, with the exception of the Pacific Northwest region, tend to have higher mean annual area burned than the eastern US. Overall, national forests with warm temperatures, dry conditions, and more variable precipitation regimes are most prone to burning.
What do you plan to do with the data from your research?
The goal moving forward is to expand and broaden the study in the upcoming fall 2015 semester. It’s difficult to complete an entire research project in 8 weeks. This will be done by identifying key climatic, biological, and social components for further study. These may include factors like fuel type, housing density, proximity to roads, and annual precipitation variability. We will also be increasing the sample size of national forests to provide more robust conclusions and allow us to examine regional differences in the continental United States.
The long term goal is to publish our results in a scientific journal and attend a scientific conference where I will present our results.
What are your goals after graduate school? Will you pursue a career in research, or do you have something else in mind?
As of right now, I have no idea what I would like to do specifically after grad school. What I do know is that I want to benefit this world for the current and future generations in some manner. I believe that there is nothing more important to protect than the world around us. We are completely dependent on the environment for everything we have, everything we will want, and everything we are. PRISM has provided me with the tools to be successful in this pursuit from critical thinking and research skills to professionalism and ethics in the lab. It has been an indispensable hands on and personal learning endeavor.
The Longwood University article is available below.
This article was posted with written permission from Dave Hooper, Assistant Vice President of Digital Marketing and Content Strategy, Longwood University.
Wildfire data puts student researcher in the hot seat
Learning a foreign language can be a struggle, and sometimes the best course of action is jumping into the deep end.
For many college students, immersion in a foreign language usually takes the form of a study abroad experience or an upper-level class in which the instructor only speaks another language.
But for Daniel Schimoler, language immersion is happening in a laboratory over eight weeks as part of the PRISM summer research program.
Schimoler ’16 is elbows deep in a half-century of climate data, and he’s learning and using the language of a statistical program called MATLAB to crunch vast data sets that hopefully reveal new information on wildfire patterns.
"A lot of what we’re doing, which is getting and analyzing data, must look monotonous and boring and tedious," Dr. Chris Labosier, assistant professor of environmental sciences and Schimoler’s research partner, told an observer. "The goal is a longer-term understanding of coarse-scale spatial patterns of fire activity. As climate changes, what also will change?"
Much of the work is done with vast amounts of data collected by the National Climatic Data Center—from about 60 national forests over the last 50 years. Schimoler puts his new language skills to work crunching this huge amount of data.
"Numbers speak; it’s just a complicated language," said Schimoler, seated next to Labosier one recent morning at a computer in Chichester. "It’s a lot of work."
Labosier agrees. "It is a lot of work to get one number," he said. "You’re taking the data to calculate numbers. We’re looking to see what the data tells us about wildfires. I learned MATLAB while doing my dissertation, but I’m still learning. It’s a steep learning curve."
Most of Schimoler’s work is done in the recently christened "Climate Science Lab" in Chichester, where the integrated environmental sciences major from Chantilly hooks his laptop up to a computer monitor. "Daniel is very independent," said Labosier. "I give him a set of instructions, and some background, and he goes to work."
"If I have any questions," said Schimoler, "I pop up to his office. I see him every morning, then check with him throughout the day and meet up with him late in the afternoon. We have a good working relationship."
Schimoler plans to study climatology in graduate school. He took two courses under Labosier during the 2014-15 academic year—meteorology and applied climatology—as well as atmospheric science during his sophomore year.
"PRISM has worked out well for me. It’s been fantastic," he said. "I’ve enjoyed having a research job, which doesn’t feel like work. My research last semester [under Dr. Kathy DeBusk Gee, assistant professor of environmental sciences] gave me a taste for research. I enjoy being able to problem-solve all day. I like answering questions."
To view the original article, visit: http://www.longwood.edu/2015releases_61757.htm