The past two years of back-to-back and record-breaking wildfire activity sparked the topics for two Gila County Cooperative Extension Thursday webinars. Tune-in Oct. 29 Gila County Emergency Manager Carl Melford will lead a discussion on planning tools such as the Gila County Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP) and how you can help to protect your home, family and community from the evolving threat of wildfire, and post-fire flooding events that follow. Then on Nov. 5 Tonto National Forest Fire Ecologist Dr. Mary Lata hosts an update on Woodbury Fire Ecology.
Cooperative Extension’s excellent series of free weekly online presentations are arranged and hosted by Chris Jones, Extension Agent, with University of Arizona Gila County Cooperative Extension. To be added to Mr. Jones invite list for gardening and horticulture workshops, email ckjones@email.arizona.edu or call 928-402-8586.
Please log in up to 10 minutes prior to the webinar; the Zoom address is arizona.zoom.us/j/95997618518; but easier and more convenient direct hotlinks are at extension.arizona.edu/gila, where you can also view previous programs, such as ‘Winter Gardening’ and ‘Payson’s New Fire Adapted Community Code’. Cooperative Extension’s website above has an array of links to programs, talks and resources for Rim Country gardeners. Links are also conveniently posted each week on Facebook, where you can join Chris Jones and a local network of gardeners and green-thumbed followers at facebook.com/gilaextension.
Oct. 29 Gila County Emergency Management
Carl Melford, Gila County’s Emergency Manager began a public safety career as a Detention Officer with the Gila County Sheriff’s Office, then as a Globe Police Department officer. In 2015 he was hired by Gila County Emergency Management, and focused on implementing Gila County’s own emergency notification system available free to residents throughout the county who opt to sign-up for real-time text, voice or email emergency alerts (you can subscribe today at readygila.com).
Nov. 5 Woodbury Fire Ecology
The Woodbury Fire (129,000 acres) was the fifth largest fire in Arizona history as of 2019, fueled by invasive grasses that converted hundreds of thousands of acres of Sonoran Desert vegetation that rarely burns into a carpet of highly flammable grasses and shrubs that burned fast and hot. Tonto National Forest staff must make difficult management decisions as the Sonoran Desert gradually becomes functionally a grass/shrub ecosystem in which fire is frequent, rather than a desert ecosystem where fire is rare. Likely management tools include selective grazing, prescribed fire, and strategic fire breaks.
Guest speaker Dr. Mary Lata, works as Fire Ecologist for the Tonto National Forest. A native Iowan, Mary Lata’s fire career started in 1993 with three seasons of mostly tallgrass prairie restoration on an internship with The Nature Conservancy. From 1999 to 2001, she worked for the National Park Service at Badlands National Park in South Dakota and as a fire effects monitor out of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, which included an assignment on a Wildfire Use Fire, where she became addicted to the study of fire. She did her PhD research on a full-ride fellowship, then accepted a permanent job as the fire ecologist for the Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands before completing it. There she managed the fuels, watershed and botany programs. She ultimately completed a Ph.D. in Geoscience at the University of Iowa, while working full time. In 2010, with an eye to improving the management of fire regimes on a landscape scale, she moved to Flagstaff as the fire ecologist on the core team for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative. Desiring to get to get back on the ground, in May 2018 she became the fire ecologist for the Tonto National Forest in Arizona.
