Dr. Jessica McCarty (@jmccarty_geo) is an Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Geospatial Analysis Center at Miami University. She has 15 years' experience in applications of geospatial and data science to terrestrial and atmospheric studies. Her expertise includes wildland and prescribed fire, agriculture and food security, land-cover/land-use change, natural resources, and climate change. She has author/co-author of 27 peer-reviewed journal articles, 12 peer-reviewed conference proceedings, 3 book chapters, 4 technical reports, 3 data citations, and 1 NASA Technology Transfer. She has served as Principal Investigator and/or Co-Investigator on NASA, EPA, USDA, and NSF grants on use of remote sensing for prescribed fire, carbon emissions, air quality, LCLUC, and agriculture/food security.
Episode Description
With each new wildfire season comes talk that the new season is worse than the last. With recent fires raging in the western u.s., the Australian bush, the Taiga of Siberia, and the forests of France. Many point to climate change as a cause of extreme fires, and scientists are creating more specificated ways of examining that relationship. That is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Dr. Jessica McCarty.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
With each new wildfire season comes talk that the new season is worse than the last with recent fires raging in the western US, the Australian bush, the tiger of Siberia, and the forest of France, many pointing to climate change as a cause of extreme fires and scientists are creating evermore sophisticated ways of examining that relationship. That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Jessica McCarty. McCarty is an expert in remote sensing and geospatial analysis. McCarty is also the director of the geospatial analysis center and Associate Professor of Geography at Miami University. She's also an Associate Program Manager for NASA wildland fire management for NASA Applied Science at headquarters. In January of 2023. She'll become the new branch chief of biospheric sciences for NASA Ames Research Center, and Moffett Field, California, supervising more than 30 scientists and engineers plus postdocs and student interns. She joins us today to talk about wildfires and climate change. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica.
Jessica McCarty
Well, thank you for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
How did you get interested in wildfires?
Jessica McCarty
Well, let's see. It's actually because when I was a kid, I lived through a few wildfires. So I'm originally from Eastern Kentucky. And I always tell people that I grew up on a farm on top of a mountain in the middle of a national forest, which is true. So we are private holders to the Daniel Boone National Forest. Oh, wow. Yeah. And before I turned 20, I had lived through three wildfires within the Daniel Boone. Yes, and my family being more than 250 years there, knew how to protect the homestead which was to keep defensible space. And then also be prepared to set fires if needed to. And we had participated in prescribed burning to keep, you know, things like ginseng production up, but also for pasture maintenance. So I just kind of grew up holistically around wildfires, and prescribed burning and just thought they were parts of the landscape. And then when I was an undergrad, I had a scholarship to go to the local university at Morehead State University. And I was hired as a student intern, and then for a short time a contractor for the US Forest Service to work at the Daniel Boone because I had these geospatial and data skills. But then they needed someone to work on fire. And they asked me to do it because I was a local. And I knew what, you know, I wasn't afraid to go to some of these places to collect data. And I knew how to get there. And I could also do the technical analysis. So that's really how I got into fire. And then it was suggested to me by one of my professors that I should consider graduate school. And honestly, I'm sure other people have told you this, but a graduate school stipend seemed like a pretty good salary to me, coming from Eastern Kentucky, so I was pretty happy to be accepted. And I went to the University of Maryland, and they actually, they paid for me to be a research assistant as a grad student working on a US Forest Service fire grant. And it just kept going from there. So I became very interested in that. And then funnily enough, my older brother became my fieldwork assistant when I was a grad student because I had skipped a year of school as a child and was pretty young to be a graduate student and couldn't rent a car. And so my older brother and I have driven, I can't tell you how many miles across the US helping farmers burn or tracking down, arranged land burning. And most of the photos of me in the field he has taken. And so And even as we plan, my family plans this move across the continent. My elder brother and I are planning to drive together during this move. So we still keep this up, this like, going across the country and recording the landscape.
Rosemary Pennington
Yeah, I'm from Scioto County in southern Ohio. And so also from Appalachia grew UPS similarly, like on this old farm, not quite on a mountain, but on a very high hill. And we dealt with fires constantly. I remember like running buckets back and forth at times. And so it just, it never struck me as something that people would research. Obviously you have to but it's sort of listening to your story. It's just sort of interesting to see how you got to where you are.
Jessica McCarty
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I do think in the Eastern US in the southern US. Our fire return intervals will we call the time period by which wildfires take a break and come back and the landscape is much longer than the Western US. And so sometimes communities don't have good memories, because they're their new communities that have developed or they've moved into these areas, or they've made them into tourist sites. And then fire becomes a nuisance and not a part of the landscape. And it just so happens that in the southern Appalachians, the human population is much more stable, in a way, you know, has been there longer time and hasn't changed as much and has, I think more is kind of woven into the cultural landscape there that fire is a risk, you have to live with fire, the wildfire season will come just as like the spring tides, the flooding season, we'll come to.
John Bailer
Yeah, no, I have to, this is great. This is really interesting. So what kind of data do you collect? To try to understand the kind of wildfire seasons? Are these intervals? Or? And then the second part of the question naturally be what kind of analyses do you do? Would you follow up with such?
Jessica McCarty
Sure, so you can collect everything from soil samples, sediment cores in lakes and rivers and dendrochronology. So the tree rings to look at historical fire return intervals. And that's normally how that's done. In North America, tree rings, our old trees are basically our, our memories, they're our, you know, hard drives, you know, of the landscape. So it didn't grow chronologist are often working in teams to go to landscapes where we know are either there aren't that many old growth or Virgin landscapes left in the Eastern US, even in the western US, but going to the ones where we know how old the trees are, we know how old the landscape is, and then very carefully, picking selecting the ones that are likely to die anyway, or are dying, and then cutting them down to do tree ring analysis. And it is counting, you know, it's counting individual rings that's putting, you know, things through spectrometry and labs. It is also things like going and asking the communities who live there. When was the first fire that you remember and asking them for the year and the month, it's going back and doing media searches. So I knew someone in grad school who compared the tree ring analysis to microfiche in the National Archives. So to see if like local media had reported on fires in that region, and when local media was stronger, yes, they did. And so now, and that's one of the like some, you know, negative consequences of local media sources not being as strong as they used to be is, sometimes they're not reported unless they're seen as like, just, you know, completely this huge emergency or completely out of the norm, when in fact, you know, most of North America's fire adapted and we would expect fire at some point in a human lifetime, you would expect to see fire once in almost every landscape. Yeah, and I don't think people know that. Yeah. So we live on a fire planet just as much as we live on a water planet. So it's better to live and thrive with the fire than it is to fear it.
John Bailer
You know, one thing that is you're describing this, and you've done a lot of work in the Arctic, you know, you talked about your where you grew up there, you know, thinking about the Amazon and think about all these communities where you have a tremendous number of stakeholders, you know, whether it's a number of states, or whether it's a number of countries, often with things like they're the indigenous peoples that are there that are all are here. So how, how does the data and the analysis that you're doing in terms of kind of understanding fire risk and impact? How does that play out in terms of thinking about policy with this disparate collection of stakeholders?
Jessica McCarty
Yeah, well, there are similarities across landscapes, the sort of the Arctic. So I am a US representative to one of the Arctic Council's working groups right now with some pause. But we did before that pause occurred in this year due the war in Ukraine, released a study where we looked at a review of all Arctic fires and boreal fire regimes that had been published in English, Russian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and French because we had Canadian colleagues working with us for the past, basically, since the middle of the 20th century forward. So it's it's more than 300 Peer Reviewed papers in order to do this review, in order to think about the future of fire, and what we decided to do was that we would only look at Western science for this. So we would look at peer reviewed scientific data, data analyses, manuscripts, datasets, and then produce then an idea of what the data is showing us what science is showing us. And then in tandem, another Arctic Council working group is using CO production with indigenous knowledge to for them to understand and tell the story and produce you know, their own knowledge and science of what the fire regimes look like now, how they're changing and what they think The future will look like. And then what we tried to do, and I think we did very successfully. And I have to say much of that credit goes to my colleagues at the gwich'in Council International, which is a first nations and Native American International Council split between northwest territories and Alaska. And they held a sharing circle across the pan Arctic kimpembe boreal where we could compare these things. So what is the science, Western science telling us? And what is the indigenous knowledge telling us, and it was invitation only, but we recorded it on Zoom. I was it was my privilege here at Miami to host it for them. And then we wrote up a report. And we what we learned was that did not matter. You know, where the indigenous community was coming from in the boreal Arctic, but they were telling us this is what they're seeing has changed. And then what their elders are telling them used to happen and had changed. And it very much aligns with tree rings, sediment core satellite data observations, and what our models are predicting. But of course, we can't say what the fire risk is going to do to community vulnerability at the fine scale, right at the neighborhood scale at the village scale. And so that is where sometimes, you know, our satellite data and our geospatial analysis has to take just a backseat, so that we can learn from local populations, and then figure out how we can help them or how we can provide the data and analysis for them to help themselves right for them to do the work.
Rosemary Pennington
So what would you in a situation like this be looking for if you were using a geospatial approach, like if you've had a you have this information, and you're looking for just an ability to kind of triangulate what you're finding in all these spaces? What might geospatial look like in relation to this?
Jessica McCarty
Sure. So one of the things we could do is think about wild food sources. And oftentimes, when we think about fire risks, we're only thinking about risk to infrastructure or buildings and energy, right, basically. But in the Arctic, in the boreal, many people are reliant on wild food, just as they are throughout, you know, many rural parts of the world. And one of the things that, that our, you know, our indigenous permanent participants of the Arctic Council have been very good at teaching us is that if you do small, low intensity fires, prescribed burning or cultural burning in the spring, that helps the grass grow, and it will attract caribou, and moose. And that usually means that they have more calves. But if you wait until the summer, and you get these huge, intense fires, and you didn't get rid of those fuels earlier on, then often that will stress out the caribou and the moose, they'll avoid those areas, and they won't have as many calves. So now you don't know where to go to hunt. And you also are, you know, hurting their generational productivity. And geospatial we could actually map in using satellite imagery as well map the intensity of fire over many, many decades, down to almost a 30 meter resolution. And for the listener, what that means is a 30 meter pixel is the size of a professional baseball diamond. So you know, it does, it's not small, but it's small enough, over a large right area, because the boreal Arctic is so big, going back basically to the early 1980s. And we can say what the fire intensity was, when it happened. And then what has happened to the vegetation since then. And then we can link that with biodiversity data.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories, and today we're talking to Miami University's Jessica McCarty about studying wildfires. So you've talked about this sort of work in the Arctic. And John mentioned Amazon, I wonder given sort of the various regions you've looked at, and you've obviously studied, thought about fire in relation to your home? Are there similarities across geographic spaces and what people are experiencing? Even though there are these diverse places?
Jessica McCarty
Yes, but there isn't one big difference that I think the global community needs to know about rainforests, which is that rainforests are not fire adapted. So unlike boreal and Arctic systems, and temperate and subtropical systems that we have here in North America, when you introduce fire to a rainforest, you don't reduce the risk of fire coming back. In fact, what you do is dry out the forest and increase the risk of fire coming back. So in Brazil, and in the legal Amazon, what we're seeing is this encroachment, right of conversion of natural landscapes into agriculture or into mining or to timber, when they set a fire, they're creating a space that will burn again and again and again, and just keep expanding.
John Bailer
So they're, they're increasing risks. They're not decreasing it as opposed to what's happening in these other contexts.
Jessica McCarty
Exactly. Yeah. And so I think that's not necessarily well understood. There's so many brilliant South American scientists. And then of course, colleagues that I know who are funded by NASA who work on this. And they try to get this message out, because I think it's lost on a lot of a lot of the global community, especially here in the in the states where we've been like an extreme fire happens in California and woof, they got, you know, a couple of decades to figure it out after that fire, right, that's actually not the case in the Amazon. Probably what burned last year will burn again the next year, and then again, the next year. And we'll just keep expanding and drying out the fuels. And I don't know, I mean, my dad loves Western. So I'm thinking it's almost like that old Ponderosa TV show where the screen lights on fire. Like that's basically what the Amazon forest is doing. Set a fire in the middle, and it just keeps spreading till it consumes the whole thing. Wow. And that's what's happening on the edges of the rainforests. And the same is true across other rainforest ecosystems. We see this in Indonesia, we see it in Central Africa, and could be true even in temperate rainforest systems. So currently, those are managed pretty well. And they don't have climate impacts like we see in the tropics. Yeah.
John Bailer
Yeah. First, I'm thinking about how many people are going to love that image of the Ponderosa? Oh, I've never seen that.
Jessica McCarty
Exactly what you're saying. I only know that's because of my father's friend.
John Bailer
Yeah. That's a great image. You know. So that's, that's a really fascinating question about, you know, how do you convince and of the, you know, countries that are doing this as part of development? Yeah, economic development as part of economic development, saying, Okay, here's, you know, here's the long term consequence of this action that you think is, maybe you think it's benign, that maybe you don't but but you know, that you you do this with an eye towards this development, but with the possibility that it's going to devastate development, or it might devastate kind of this resource that you might count on? You know, whether it's, you know, kind of this Amazon has this incredible resource for the world?
Jessica McCarty
Yeah, I mean, all rain forests or rainforests?
John Bailer
Yeah. But that's certainly kind of the poster child for rainforests, right?
Jessica McCarty
So I think it's that I know, because what the listeners don't know is that John and I actually know each other in real life, and IRL. But we've talked about this. People don't respond to data, right? They do love pretty maps, and they love satellite imagery. And I can tell you that when I was in grad school, I had a hell of a time telling people what I did for a living, they just couldn't like, picture it. But now. Yeah. And now they know, they're like, Oh, I know that I've seen that, you know, on social media I've seen on Yeah. Okay, great. So because people don't respond to data, we need to be able to tell them a story, which I guess was why you have stats and stories, right. And the story is really about the base root of economics, and ecology is the same word. And Greek, which is oil coasts, which means home, right. And so just like economics is, it is based on the Eco ecology is based on the Eco. And if you destroy the ecology, you will destroy your economics. Of course, it's hard to convince people who don't have enough money to buy food. So we need to be thinking more about how to not just help each other, but to make sure we're providing people with support to help themselves and alternatives to help themselves, and listening to those communities when they tell us what they want, and not just telling them what they want. You know, I have a small child. And it's like, I didn't realize the teenage years started so soon. I thought I thought I could at least get to middle school, but I was wrong. But I think we should, in the same way that you know, children don't like being told what to do unless you can give them a good reason. Right. And I think it's the same, same situation here. And it is hard, I do think, and this is something that is kind of outside the scope of data. But when we talk like when at the intersection of science and policy, so when scientists have to talk to decision makers, policymakers, even politicians, we need to be able to be humble enough to know our own history. And it's real hard to tell the people who live in the legal Amazon that they shouldn't be cutting down their forests, when most of the developed world has already done that. It's just that we did it 200 years ago, and now our forests have, you know, rebounded to the most part. So we need to make peace with our own stories and our own data. And, and then hopefully come together in, you know, potentially in these kinds of CO production ways like what knowledge can we derive. Brazil needs economic development? Great. How can we do that? But no more rain forest is disturbed? Right? Yeah.
Rosemary Pennington
So I started this podcast with this sort of hinting at this rhetoric that you hear a lot like climate change is making wildfires worse. And so I'm going to ask you sort of given the work you've done, because we are getting towards the end of time, and I have to ask questions like, is climate change making wildfires worse? And how do we know one way or the other?
Jessica McCarty
So climate change is making wildfires worse, climate change is making the conditions for fires to start worse, as well. So basically, what's happening is our atmosphere in most places is dry and getting drier and hotter, but particularly at the surface. And any, anybody who has ever mowed a lawn knows that you can't mow a lawn when it's too wet, right, you have to wait till it dries. But if it gets too dry, you might set a fire. So it's the same thing on a large scale with our forests and grasslands. And honestly, any human dominated system as well. Climate change is taking moisture out of the air, it is drying the landscape and it's increasing heat, which means any ignition source will cause a fire. And that's really how climate change is increasing the risk. There's other secondary components like climate change that drive infestation of different types of beetles and moss that will also kill forests. We know that the emerald ash borer came through most of the North now, most of eastern North America, like the northern part of Quebec is dealing with the emerald ash borer. Now, because climate change has increased the basic domain in which it can live. The other situation is that climate change is also increasing the heat in the part of the atmosphere where lightning is generated. And as we get more lightning strikes, we just have more possibilities for ignition. But humans are still the main ignition source of fires, which means we can reduce fire risk and fire ignitions. In general, there are still solutions that are human centric, even as climate change is making the overall conditions worse. And I sometimes find that, especially when talking with college students and graduate students, that they want me to give them hope. And like, again, John knows me in real life, like, I am not the person to turn to for hope. But I will tell you how to solve the problem. And so I just always tell them that we know that there are solutions that just work the problem, right. And I always think of it as like, I have several friends who are sober, and they talk about how they they work the steps, you know, in order to maintain sobriety, and I think like, for climate change, we could maybe learn from that community, like basically, we're just gonna have to work the steps, we need to reduce fire risk, we need to make our communities more fire resilient. And we need to do climate action. So that we stop the heating of the atmosphere, it's, you know, it's and we do all these steps at the same time. And every day, we wake up, and we do the same steps again and again. And, and eventually, things will improve, but you never really get to stop doing those things. You just kind of have to keep doing it. I mean, I make coffee every morning, right? I'm gonna make coffee every morning till I die. So we can all also just everyday work a little on climate and, and that's it and still live our lives and have big things to look forward to.
John Bailer
So, you know, I think a lot about risk assessment and risk estimation in other contexts. And, you know, fire risk assessment I first encountered this decades ago, when someone was, and I was really intrigued that there were people that were working on this kind of problem. And you're describing kind of managing, thinking about steps towards managing this risk. And you've mentioned a couple of things. And I find thinking as is, as we just saw the announcement that the world population had 8 billion in recent weeks. So we have more and more pressure on this natural resource on land use in particular, and then it translates. So when you think about the various steps that you've described, do you have any thoughts about how to remove some of the barriers for implementing some of these steps? You've kind of taken it away in part, we need to be telling the story of the importance of, you know, managing this risk in our communities, this fire risk in particular, and the fact that it's a consequence of some other things that we need to be addressing. But how can you help us tell the story better? Can you help us think about how we convince people to move forward on removing some of the barriers towards implementation?
Jessica McCarty
Yes. And I guess at this moment, I have to say, right now, I am not a civil servant, I do not speak for NASA, or the federal government, though I will be transitioning to that position soon. And the reason I bring that up as one of the things I think is really important is transparent and open science. In order to help people make these risk assessments, we live in a time where people are kind of allergic to nuance. And so in order for there to be any trust, and the risk analyzes that we're trying to show them, we need to be able to also show that all the data is open and transparent. So they themselves can also do the analysis. And that means making the tools open and transparent means making the training open and transparent. And that's really what I think NASA and other federal agencies in the US are doing and doing more of, particularly around wildfire. And I know from professional and personal experience that many of our agencies that are kind of tasked with the operational component of wildland firefighting, do not always have the most trusted reputations by the local communities, particularly in the Western US. But I do know that when NASA or NOAA or USGS is willing to work with the local population to share the data to very quickly make it open that that tends to lower the temperature locally. So that the wildland firefighters can do their work incident command can do their work. And the community knows that they still trust these, the science and operational agencies who are working on wildfire, but who aren't doing the wildland firefighting. And that's why we want to keep that trust. So how are we going to communicate risk assessment better? How we are going to do better risk assessment is so hard work around everything right now, which is building and maintaining trust. And I do think in the geospatial sector, that means everything, every data, we collect all the satellite imagery, all the software, all the analysis, it has to be open and transparent to the public. So they know how we got to the conclusion we got to
John Bailer
And then the man, it seems like the compliment is that all the management options that are being considered along with the support for them should be open and available for assessment and evaluation.
Jessica McCarty
That's right, yeah. And real time, is that going to happen? No. But after the fact Yes. So that the next time this occurs, the public knows, these are the management solutions. These are the choices, this isn't a roll of the die here. So they understand why that choice was made, and make him better advocate for different choices or for the choices they want. And it's just kind of all based on trust and the information stream. Yeah, I know, that's not because I do not have a PhD in communications. I actually have a PhD in geography and Geographical Sciences and geography. So I may not be the person to work on this, but I'm happy to work with communication experts.
Rosemary Pennington
I think you did a great job. Stellar. All right. Well, that's all the time we actually have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Jessica, thank you so much for joining us.
Jessica McCarty Sure. Thanks for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.