Alan Ager

Alan's interests are in the design, development, and testing of quantitative models to disentangle conflicting policies and understand management tradeoffs at multiple scales and across social and biophysical domains. System-level drivers are studied from both a socioeconomic and ecological perspective to gain governance level understanding of fire management. Landscape modeling software is used to conduct scenario planning to understand large scale interactions between natural disturbances and wildfire over time. Current focus is on transboundary wildfire risk from public lands to developed areas, and how risk transmission is amplified on landscapes fragmented by ecological conditions and risk governance systems. This information is used to analyze how the scale of planning and governance affect progress towards reducing socioeconomic and ecological impacts from wildfires. Of particular interest are identifying functional, spatial, and temporal scale mismatches in transboundary wildfire risk governance, and using this information to design planning frameworks that address the spectrum of fire ecology and management issues on mixed tenure landscapes.