Fire Management in the National Park Service

"NC State University and the Center for Geospatial Analytics is proud to select Alexander Yoshizumi as our 2023 EIP Student of the Year. Alexander was an easy choice for the 2023 Esri EIP Student of the Year. His collaborative work with the National Park Service, Veteran Fire Crews, and NC State researchers resulted in a powerful StoryMap to shed light on the many stories of veterans in fire management. Alexander's work demonstrates the power of StoryMaps to cohesively tell a story through text, maps, and other visualizations, and his work will continue to lead to further collaboration and storytelling. Read more about Alexander, his work, and see the full StoryMap below." - Dr. Eric Money, Associate Director of Educational Innovation, Center for Geospatial Analytics, North Carolina State University.

I am a PhD candidate in the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State University. During my undergraduate, I studied environmental science, health, and geography. After finding a specific passion for energy and environment, I pursued a master's degree where I gained skills in energy systems modeling, operations research, and geospatial analytics.

While navigating how my passion for geospatial analytics fit together with my love of energy systems (and systems modeling more broadly), I immersed myself in opportunities to learn from others by pursuing event planning and communications roles that placed me at the center of exciting conversations around the future of both fields.

Today, as a PhD candidate at NC State, I leverage all of these skills simultaneously. For my dissertation, I use energy modeling and geographic information systems (GIS) to identify resilient configurations of electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployment, and, as a part of my graduate research assistantship, I support the National Park Service (NPS) with messaging and engagement through media collection, video editing, data visualization, analysis, and strategic communications planning.

The through line of my work is a passion for the environment and a desire to achieve a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient future for generations to come.

As a part of my responsibilities for NPS, I have traveled to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve multiple times to work with and showcase recent-era military veterans taking part in the North Atlantic-Appalachian Region's new veteran fire crew training program, co-facilitated by NPS and Conservation Legacy. This work culminated in a StoryMap publication about the program that was published through NPS last year.

The fire training program is incredibly important as it not only serves as a stepping stone to bring veterans into fire management, but it also serves to forward NPS's mission of preserving unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.

Thoughtful fire management and fuels reduction will be even more important in the future as climate change increasingly affects the frequency, season length, and burned area of wildfires (USGCRP 2018, Westerling 2016). The graph below highlights how total area burned has increased over time.

The StoryMap that I created for NPS was the culmination of months of work, not just from me but also from collaborators at NC State University and NPS. The project involved media collection, structured interviews, infographic design, and more. The creative process that drove our storytelling was deeply collaborative, and this was facilitated by the many tools and features that Esri supports. We often found ourselves sharing layers through ArcGIS Online, responding to feedback, and iterating on exactly how we wanted maps to flow within the StoryMap that we were developing.

Currently, there are plans to continue telling stories around veterans in fire management as the North Atlantic-Appalachian Region's veteran fire training program moves into its second year. This year, there were actually several unplanned wildfires within New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and staff at NPS were able to quickly share layers with us while working out at field sites using ArcGIS Field Maps, which we could then use to generate additional data layers that contextualize the fire location such as slope and terrain ruggedness.

As a showcase of the work from that first year (and as a preview of products to come), I have embedded the full StoryMap developed for NPS below:

This work would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my advisor, Dr. Jelena Vukomanovic, the collaboration and support from staff members at the National Park Service, and the help of my colleagues and lab mates here at NC State.