Milestones in communication

By Chuck Bushey

I believe it is important to note milestones with family and friends to remember what has been and to think about the future. With family it is often birthdays and anniversaries, friends it might be that special school graduation year. Organizations such as IAWF sometimes lose track of those special temporal signposts that can remind us of what our purpose is and how far we have come. With the constant changing of officers, board members and the grassroots membership it is easy to forget — to lose our “corporate memory.” Our association's mission statement maintains that part of our “purpose is to foster communication and furnish leadership for the wildland fire community.” Within our vision statement we declare that IAWF will “be an acknowledged resource for local to global scale scientific and technical knowledge, education, networking and professional development.” Obviously, a fundamental purpose of IAWF since its founding has been fostering interaction within our global wildland fire community.

With that avowed task in mind I would like to remind everyone that this year marks the 20th anniversary of Wildfire, our membership magazine, and the International Journal of Wildland Fire, our peer reviewed scientific journal dedicated solely to wildland fire research. Twenty years of sustained effort is a milestone that not only reaffirms our original purpose, but acknowledges the continued need for the products. Twenty years marks the continuous efforts of many dedicated people. Both publications have a strong symbiotic relationship with IAWF and intimately reflect our organizations growth around the world. Both go back to the vision of a few individuals for whom this was a labor of love and dedication to seek out start-up funding, pull together those early articles and papers, and physically get the pages off the press and shipped to the readers with the purpose to make our community more knowledgeable, achieve higher standards, and safely accomplish our fire/land management tasks.

Both periodicals started out being completely done in-house by IAWF with much of the early publishing accomplished by Jason Greenlee. We eventually saw that the best practice was to let professionals in the publishing business take over the printing and shipping roles. We now have handling much of the day-to-day business the publishing houses of CSIRO in Australia for the “Journal” and Penton Media in the USA for Wildfire.

Over the years, our “Journal” has been tightly guided by many editors including Ross Wein, Mike Weber, Gwynfor Richards, Mike Flannigan, and now co-editors Stefan Doerr and Susan Conard. There is an Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) overseen by the IAWF Board and current CSIRO publisher Richard Hecker. A world renowned scientific group of associate editors review incoming papers and work with the authors to maintain a high standard of quality that has made it one of the premier research journals in the natural sciences and definitely the lead in wildland fire research. Originally, to read the “Journal” you needed to own a hardcopy subscription or have access to a research library. You can still do both, but now if you are an IAWF member you also have free online access to all research papers. If not a member, you can purchase and download papers. The goal has been to sustain a working business model while continuing to increase access.

Wildfire magazine has always been strongly influenced by individual members of our Board of Directors who have overseen its content and style. We have an EAB and contributing editors who scour the world for pertinent and hopefully interesting authors and articles such as this issue's feature article concerning wildland fire in Italy. Some of the magazine articles are available online for reading. Shortly we will let everyone know of a new online location where we will begin publishing additional topical content that might not have fit our tight criteria for the hardcopy magazine, such as length — increasing the options for both writers and readers.

Help us move into the next 20 years by sharing your wildland fire knowledge with the rest of the world through IAWF, and thank you to the many past shoulders that we stand upon.

International Assn. of Wildland Fire
3416 Primm Ln. Birmingham, AL 35216

ph: 205-824-7614 iawf@iawfonline.org

To join the IAWF, visit www.iawfonline.org

Send them to:
Wildfire Magazine

Attn: Kevin Daniels
kevindaniels@earthlink.net