International Fire Safety Consortium Releases Free, Open Access Video Webinar Series on Wildland Fires in Partnership with UL’s Fire Safety Research Institute and UMD

The International Fire Safety Consortium (IFSC), a network co-led by the University of Maryland that brings together leading higher-education institutions and fire safety research organizations from around the world, has announced the release of a new series of free, open access educational video webinars on wildland fires, in partnership with UL’s Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI). 

The webinar series is expected to bring visibility to the research community in fire safety engineering and to promote much needed interactions between fire safety engineers, fire ecologists, atmospheric scientists, geographical scientists and beyond. Comprised of 31 videos, the series offers a 15-week, 3-hours-per-week format, and provides a basis for an educational course on wildland fires in an academic engineering program. The webinars address such topics as fire behavior, fire ecology, weather and atmospheric science, fuel ignition, flame spread, fire emissions, mitigation measures, and other topics.

The new wildland webinar series represents a community-level effort, featuring a diverse group of leading experts on wildland and wildland-urban-interface fires. The webinar videos feature 29 instructors, mostly from the U.S., Australia, and Europe.

“The problems posed by wildland fires and wildland-urban-interface (WUI) fires are at the interface between separate scientific communities, [including] fire safety engineers, fire ecologists and atmospheric scientists, and there is a need to share information and knowledge between these communities so that we can better coordinate efforts and collectively develop solutions to mitigate the negative impact of wildland/WUI fires on the human, ecological and climate systems,” said Arnaud Trouvé, Chair of the IFSC and Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland.

The videos are hosted on FSRI’s Fire Safety Academy online learning platform and are accessible at FSRI.org. All videos are provided for viewing or for download, for personal information, and for possible non-commercial reuse, and are licensed under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.  FSRI, a part of UL Research Institutes, the nonprofit research organization within the UL enterprise, advances fire safety knowledge to address the world’s unresolved fire safety risks and emerging dangers and is a member of the IFSC.

“IFSC compiling and sharing this collection of wildland and WUI educational resources will help elevate and facilitate collective, cross-disciplinary research efforts to address the hazards posed by these large-scale fires to the global community,” said Dr. Steve Kerber, Vice President and Executive Director at FSRI. "We are proud to host the webinar series through our Fire Safety Academy and are honored to support this important initiative.”

The IFSC Consortium brings together worldwide expertise to tackle emerging fire safety challenges, engaging in research, education, and collaboration with industry, government, and non-governmental organizations to help inform policy and practice, protect property, and save lives. IFSC members and partners include: University of Maryland, University of Edinburgh, Lund University, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, Ghent University, University of California, Berkeley, UL Research Institutes, and the Fire Safety Research Institute. To learn more about the IFSC, visit: https://intlfire.org.