Announcing the first WFC2016 keynote speakers!
With less than 6 months to go until Wildland Fire Canada 2016, it’s time to announce our first round of confirmed guest speakers.
But first, here’s a reminder that the call for papers is still open, and we want your abstract submissions! Abstracts for oral or poster presentations will be accepted until June 30th. See www.wildlandfire2016.ca/abstract-submission for more details and the submission form.
Note that there was an error in the theme descriptions in the last newsletter. Please see www.wildlandfire2016.ca/program for corrected and updated theme descriptions.
The first confirmed keynote speakers for Wildland Fire Canada 2016 hail from Canada and the USA:
Dr. Francis Zwiers is the Executive Director and CEO of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium in Victoria, BC. Dr. Zwiers is a member of the Nobel-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as a former Research Scientist, Chief of the Climate Modeling and Analysis, and Director of the Climate Research Division at Environment Canada.
Dr. Satyamoorthy Kabilan (who goes by ‘Kabi’) is the Director of National Security and Strategic Foresight at the Conference Board of Canada. Dr. Kabilan is an authority on disaster response and resilience and has worked in senior strategic positions in intelligence, counter-terrorism and defense in the United Kingdom; he has also founded two technology startups
John McLean of Washington, D.C. and Montana, USA is a former Chicago Tribune journalist who headed west over twenty years ago to reclaim his roots and write non-fiction. He has completed five (soon to be six) highly-acclaimed books on fatality fires in the western US, presenting an investigative voice for the American fire community around these tragic events. His latest effort focuses on the 2013 Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona that resulted in 19 fatalities among the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew.
We hope you are as excited as we are to have these accomplished individuals in our conference lineup.
Stay tuned for subsequent newsletters, which will highlight additional guest speakers, conference workshops, WFC awards, entertainment features, and more!
The Wildland Fire Canada conference is a biennial conference series that brings together forest fire management practitioners, researchers and industry to highlight and discuss emerging trends in forest fire management.
Wildland Fire Canada 2016 will be taking place in beautiful Kelowna, British Columbia at the Delta Grand Okanagan Resort and Conference Centre from October 24 to 28, 2016.
Kind Regards,
Wildland Fire Canada 2016 Organizing Committee