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Report by José G. Borges (Coordinator of IUFRO Unit 4.04.04 Sustainable forest management scheduling and Keynote Speaker), Filipe P. Alvelos (Chair of the Program and Organizing Committees) and Sándor Tóth (Coordinator of IUFRO Unit 3.04.01 Operations systems analysis and modeling and Member of the Program Committee).
Meeting Website; https://ow.dps.uminho.pt/
The Optimization and Wildfire Conference (O&W) brought together researchers and practitioners who develop and/or use operational research and decision-making methods including optimization models and solution approaches for wildfire-related decision problems. It reported the state-of-the art on the development and use of management science approach to address wildfire concerns in forest management planning.
The conference took place on 1-4 October 2024 in Luso, Portugal. It involved 58 participants from 13 countries in Europe, America and Oceania. Its program encompassed three keynote presentations:
Dr. Dave Martell discussed the operational research perspective in wildfire management, described research conducted in Canada and identified open problems where operational researchers can make important contributions.
Dr. Yu Wei focused on two aspects of developing operations research models for wildland fire decision support, namely spatially explicit modeling and managing uncertainty.
Dr. José Borges outlined research targeting the integration of forest and fire management as well as the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services in contexts of global change and presented recent research on adaptive territorial management to address extreme wildfire events.
It encompassed further 46 oral presentations organized into 10 sessions focusing on key areas within wildfire management, including fuel management and characterization, fire detection, resource allocation, suppression resource dispatch and deployment, assets and values-at-risk protection, combined decision problems, budgeting, fire spread simulation, risk analysis, remote sensing and decision-support systems. The full list of abstracts is available; HERE
The conference worked well as a meeting place for experts on fire and forest management in a broad sense. It brought together researchers at very different stages of their careers, from PhD students to senior researchers from different continents. The arrangements in Luso, a small town in Central Portugal renowned for its thermal waters, was ideal for the conference.
The three days of scientific work included a visit to the historical Buçaco Forest, a 17th century walled national forest extending over 105 ha and home to one of the finest dendrological collections in Europe; and a much-appraised conference dinner and musical recital of Fado de Coimbra at the Curia Palace Hotel.
The Optimization and Wildfire Conference (O&W) was organized by Prof. Filipe P. Alvelos from the School of Engineering, Department of Production and Systems at the University of Minho, Portugal. It was supported by IUFRO Units 4.04.04 and 3.04.01 as well as by the project "O3F - An Optimization Framework to reduce Forest Fire" funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (DOI 10.54499/PCIF/GRF/0141/2019) and the Associação Portuguesa para a Investigação Operacional (APDIO).
The conference provided a) a venue for the presentation of state-of-the-art applications ranging from operations research to wildfire-related decision problems and b) opportunities for a fertile exchange of ideas among participants.
The O&W presenters were welcomed to submit their research to a post-conference proceedings volume to be published by Springer in the series Lecture Notes in Operations Research (the deadline for submitting manuscripts is January 15, 2025).