Adirondack Fire Futures Symposium Brings Experts Together to Prepare for a Changing Relationship With Fire

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August 24, 2026

Wildfire in the Adirondacks is not expected to look like the large, fast-moving fires that have become familiar in the western United States. But researchers say the region's relationship with fire is changing, raising new questions about the health of its forests and the preparedness of its communities.

"I think it's important to consider how fire regimes are changing in the Adirondacks. I think that has a historical context, it has a right-now context and it has a future," said Andrew Vander Yacht, an assistant professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry who runs the Applied Forest & Fire Ecology Lab (AFFEL).

Vander Yacht was among the researchers, practitioners, policymakers and community partners who gathered at Clarkson University from July 27 to 29 for the Adirondack Fire Futures Symposium, a National Science Foundation-sponsored event focused on convergent research and policy for Adirondack wildfire resilience.

The three-day symposium brought together expertise from fields that do not always find themselves in the same room. Its program ranged from forest ecology and community preparedness to drones, electrical infrastructure and industry innovation.

For many participants, that range of perspectives was one of the event's strengths.

"Mainly I am just really impressed with everyone coming at this problem from all sorts of directions," said Sasha Goodnow, a research specialist at the University of Missouri's Center for Tree Ring Science.

Goodnow came to the symposium with an interest in fire ecology and traditional ecological knowledge and presented the National Fire Scar Survey, an app built for researchers, scientists and citizen scientists who encounter fire-scarred wood in the field. Users can take photographs, answer survey questions and upload information that can help the Center for Tree Ring Science reconstruct the fire history of an area.

That history could be particularly valuable in the Adirondacks, where more than a century of fire suppression has altered the relationship between fire and the landscape.

"I would be super curious to know if there is a lot of fire scarred wood out in the Adirondacks," Goodnow said. "That could determine that fire has been a part of the landscape in the past."

The Adirondacks have experienced significant fires before. More than 600,000 acres burned during the drought of 1903, while fires in 1908 produced smoke that traveled from New York City to Quebec. In the decades since, fire suppression and the region's typically moist climate have helped make wildfire relatively uncommon.

The concern discussed at the symposium was not that the Adirondacks are suddenly becoming the American West. Instead, researchers are considering what changes in climate, forests and human communities could mean in a region that has spent generations largely without fire.

"This is not about fearmongering. I think that almost everyone here recognizes that this is a fire-infrequent region. This is a low-intensity fire region. And even when we state, pretty definitively, that the likelihood, extent and number of wildfires is going to increase in the future, we are not talking about western fires," Vander Yacht said. "These are going to be low intensity events, they will smolder for a long time and they will be hard to put out, but it is not this giant threat we are trying to fearmonger about. It is much more about recognizing that perhaps what's more scary is how long our systems have gone without that fire."

Vander Yacht's work centers on the idea that disturbance is important to forest resilience. At the symposium, he discussed Fire Integrated One Health, an approach that considers fire through its interconnected effects on forests, plants, wildlife and people, including physical and mental health.

"That generates this giant cloud of confusing positive and negative effects that are really hard to sort through and deal with. So what we are suggesting, first of all, is we are all interconnected anyway; and second, integrating fire into this perspective."

He said discussions at the symposium demonstrated how broad those connections can be, from the effects of smoke to changes in soil and nutrients.

"I have been surprised and pleased by the diversity of perspectives that were brought to the table," Vander Yacht said. "Thinking about how smoke can lead to chemical damage and destruction of properties, that is pretty interesting. How fire might affect various soil properties and soil nutrients. It kind of speaks to the power of Fire Integrated One Health."

The relationship between people, fire and the landscape was also at the center of the symposium's opening keynote. Jade Haumann, an Onondaga Nation independent scholar who conducts public education around fire and safe fire practices, spoke about the history of fire, Indigenous history and the importance of building partnerships as communities prepare for a future in which fire may play a greater role.

"As we all know fire is very much in our lives now. Whether or not we see the smoke, we are still impacted one way or another. So, my personal mission is to educate folks about the history of fire. That is hand-in-hand with indigenous history, being able to get that awareness up and being able to move forward together in our future with fire, because we are inevitably going to have to live with fire," Haumann said.

Her keynote focused on collaboration through community work and on giving people tools to build partnerships that account for the effects of fire on more than human communities.

"Fire, whether it is prescribed fire or wildland fire, is very much community oriented," Haumann said.

Haumann outlined how fire impacts not only humans, but also the plants and animals all around us. Being able to recognize those impacts help communities collaborate in a way that is at once serious and intentional, but also constructive and positive, is at the heart of her message.

Those questions of community preparedness are especially complicated in the Adirondacks, according to Susan Powers, Director of Clarkson's Institute for a Sustainable Environment.

Powers said the event reinforced how much remains unknown, not only about the ecological risk but about how Adirondack communities can respond.

"I am learning that we just don't know enough about any aspect of the potential for wildfire in the Adirondacks. We know it's going to happen, but we don't understand the ecology enough. We certainly don't understand communities and community resiliency enough, and that's the work I have been doing most," Powers said.

The region presents challenges that go beyond understanding where fires might occur.

"We have aging permanent residents, aging fire response volunteers who don't know how to fight forest fires. The DEC certainly does but they have the whole Adirondack park, the whole state to cover," Powers said.

Tourism, she said, deserves particular attention in future emergency planning. The Adirondacks receive a large influx of visitors who may be unfamiliar with local emergency procedures and communication systems.

Those social questions complement the ecological and technological research discussed throughout the symposium. The event's five broad tracks - Forestry, Ecology & Wildfire; Drones as First Responders; Power Infrastructure & Fire Risk; Community Preparedness & Policy; and Industry Engagement & Innovation - were designed to encourage participants to look beyond their individual disciplines.

The challenge now is carrying those connections forward.

The symposium is part of an effort to advance FIRE-NET: Adirondack Fire Futures, a regional collaborative intended to connect researchers, agencies, practitioners and communities around wildfire science, resilience and policy. The goal is to translate research and collaboration into practical approaches to issues ranging from land management and infrastructure to emergency response and community preparedness.

For Vander Yacht, that future may also require reconsidering fire itself.

"When you think about most of the fire adapted tree species, they are better adapted to drought, to higher temperatures. So as we move into a future with all of those, maybe fire is a way to kind of manage ourselves out of this situation and put more diversity into our systems," he said.
And for Haumann, the gathering offered evidence that those conversations are already changing how people approach the issue.

"It's cool to see the active change in people's minds and work to actively be prepared for our future. That is really inspiring and I am hoping we can continue these programs and continue having these conversations," she said.