Welcome to The Pyrocene!

Assistant Professor, Stewart Wilson, with team of students ready to collect soil data in burn scar.
Left to right: Grace Damaschino, Alex Sanchez, Penny Dellapelle, Stewart Wilson, Lis Kraycik, Paige Davis

Understanding the relationship between humans and fire

The pyrocene [pahy-ruh-seen] is a term increasingly used to describe the relationship between humans and fire, and in the context of drying a climate, it describes how human-driven climate change is impacting our society and natural systems.

The pyrocene has arrived in California, resulting in the five largest fires in California history occurring in the last three years. A team of Cal Poly faculty and students, led by Assistant Professor Stewart Wilson, are using novel geospatial and data science tools to help federal agencies and other land managers understand and predict the effects of catastrophic megafire on soil properties in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada. 

When catastrophic megafires burn through larger areas, they significantly affect soil properties, including degradation of hydrologic function, stability, carbon storage and watershed function. These impacts directly threaten life and property due to flooding and landslide hazards and significantly impact downstream habitat and drinking water supplies.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s (CalFire) Watershed Emergency Response Team (WERT) and the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams conduct postfire assessments of the intensity of thermal damage to soils to map the severity of fires’ effects to soil and watershed properties for use in debris-flow and other hazard assessment models. These model outputs are directly used to guide decision-making around management interventions and watershed restoration. 

Wilson’s multidisciplinary teams bring together soil science, computer science and geospatial science to create a new way to develop soil burn severity maps to guide post-fire decision-making by managers. This interdisciplinary approach allows students to engage in a unique combination of extensive field work and data collection in forest systems with new geospatial and data science tools that are becoming increasingly central to helping us improve natural resource management. 

This research provides a great example of Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing ethos and the interest that Cal Poly faculty and students have in addressing real-world problems.

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Read more stories in the Summer 2023 Newsletter