ICLR Friday Forum: Loss modelling of WUI fires (Nov. 14, 2025)

On November 14, 2025 ICLR and the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada (WRCC) hosted a webinar titled 'Modeling of Wildland Urban Interface Fires', led by Dr. Michael Gollner, Berkely Fire Research Lab. Modeling the transition between fire spread in wildland fuels into communities at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is of great importance to the fire research community. Models help us understand the processes by which these fires spread and help to inform future mitigative actions. Until now, no model of fire growth and spread has included both wildlands and urban areas; one could not model the progress of fires across the WUI. A new coupled model for WUI fire spread that incorporates embers, direct flame contact, and radiation will be presented and used to reconstruct several large WUI fires in California. We also use this model to estimate exposure coupled with the extensive CAL FIRE damage inspection (DINS) dataset in California, revealing the structure, exposure, vegetation, and other important features for structure loss in WUI fires. Dr. Michael Gollner is an Associate Professor, Deb Faculty Fellow and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an Associate Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD from 2012-2019. Dr. Gollner studies how fires ignite and spread within the WUI, the physics and dynamics of wildland fire spread, the processes by which structures ignite from embers, and emissions and associated health effects from wildfire smoke.