Current Projects

The Computational Ecology Group and partners developed HexFire, a wildfire simulator, to approximate fire spread across heterogeneous landscapes. We are extending the model to serve as an iterative fire simulator that can be linked with wildlife simulations to forecast the long-term impacts of fire regime change on population persistence.   

HexFire can simulate short and long-distance fire progression through multiple spread mechanisms. This tool can be used to explore wildfire suppression strategies as it can simulate fire interaction with fuel breaks and barriers. HexFire can be employed as a proxy for more detailed fire simulators, and to assess the implications of wildfire for local ecological systems. Because it was coded within HexSim, HexFire can be linked to a range of connectivity, population viability, gene flow, disease spread, and other ecological response models.  

CEG and partners are using HexFire to simulate historic fires and future fire regimes in the Great Basin of the United States to measure the impact of wildfire on multiple species of conservation concern.