Digging Deeper: The Mutual Exchange of Operational and Academic Intelligence

North Atlantic Fire Science Exchange Spring 2026 Student Webinar Series

April 9, 2026 11am ET

Speaker: Anna Welch

Bio: Anna is an MS student at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry as a member of the Applied Forest and Fire Ecology Lab (AFFEL). She is also an operational wildland firefighter entering her sixth season in Northern California with the United States Forest Service. Her primary research interest is evaluating wildland fire response strategies and tactics through the lens of practitioners.

Webinar: After four seasons serving on an Interagency Hotshot Crew, Anna developed a deep appreciation for the breadth and depth of knowledge her peers and leadership used to inform their tactical responses to fire. During her webinar, she will share key lessons from her experiences and discuss how these lessons motivated her to prioritize the incorporation and integration of wildland fire operational intelligence within academic and management contexts. Facilitating meaningful exchange between practitioner and academic communities has become a cornerstone of her thesis, as well as the “Pyrotourism” professional development experience that she co-pioneered with Maria Loughran, a fellow graduate student and fire practitioner in the AFFEL. She believes that experiential and theoretical knowledge can work in concert to enhance operational efficiency, improve multidisciplinary coordination, and better align incident response outcomes with fire stewardship and management objectives.