The Office of Graduate Programs is pleased to announce that Aita Bezzola will be defending their thesis entitled “Incorporating the Ethic of Context and Place in Mechanistic Research: A Place-Based Wildfire Risk Assessment in the Xaxli’p Survival Territory” as a candidate for the degree Master of Science in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies (Biology). We encourage you to view the defence online. The details on the defence and how to join are included below.

DATE:  July 9, 2020

TIME:  10:00 am

LINK TO JOIN: https://unbc.zoom.us/j/94566101387?pwd=SEI5eExzei83SHQ0SW4vMHRxOTREZz09

Meeting ID: 945 6610 1387

Password: 489705

To ensure the defence proceeds with no interruptions, please mute your audio and video on entry and do not share your screen inadvertently. The meeting will be locked to entry 5 minutes after it begins, ensure you are on time.

ABSTRACT:  Wildfires pose a significant economic and social challenge to communities throughout British Columbia. For some indigenous communities, a large landscape fire has the potential to change their traditional territory and communities permanently. To allocate limited resources to the costly effort of wildfire mitigation, communities need a baseline for the spatial distribution of risk. For the Xáxli’p and their community forest, the wildfire risk is an urgent concern, locally effected by forest fuels, human ignition, and wind. Local knowledge of community members gathered through workshops were used to validate existing forest, wind, and access data. Using existing data and community data, areas of higher risk and other landscape considerations were identified and mapped to support planning by the Xáxli’p Community Forest to create a fire-resilient landscape.