A Small World

Tatiana Sofronova, a visiting student researcher from Siberia, and Kevin Ryan, a U.S Fire Service research fire ecologist and her adviser, discuss the importance of educational exchanges as the international wildfire community grows closer.

What are your future prospects?

Sofronova: My Fulbright experience raised my own qualifications and widened my personal perspectives. First of all, I want to incorporate what I learned in the United States into my courses and curricula and into my creative work. I hope to keep my new professional and social contacts for many years. And I hope to be in a strong position to continue researching topics and questions related to both countries.

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This fire season, we again witnessed in Northern California and elsewhere in the United States an event that has become almost commonplace the implementation of international wildland fire cooperation agreements that facilitate the exchange of firefighting personnel, equipment and training. ...

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the International Institute of Education, which made my Montana Fulbright experience come true. I express my boundless gratitude to my scientific supervisors: Dr. Ron Wakimoto, College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana, and Dr. Kevin Ryan for their tremendous input into my professional development. I am thankful to the Foreign Student and Scholar Services at the University of Montana for facilitating my adjustment to the new environment. And I thank the Missoula Fire Lab for letting me join their fire science family, for making my stay productive, cognitive, exciting and very inspiring for future endeavors. It was a great pleasure to be there and a great investment into my memories.

Ryan: My future plans are to continue to develop a broader understanding of the ecology of fire in the boreal forests and to expand the scope of my research through the valuable association with Tatiana and others at the Sukachev Institute.

Tatiana M. Sofronova is an assistant professor at the Astafiev's Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University (Siberia, Russia) specializing in ecology and English, and a scientific researcher at the Sukachev Institute of Forest in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Her research interests include fire danger, fire behavior and fire effects prediction, vegetation fuel mapping, terminology, and translation and interpreting. She can be reached at tmsofronova@gmail.com.

Kevin C. Ryan is a research fire ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula Fire Science Laboratory. His research interests include process-level integration of fuel consumption, fire behavior and fire effects; spatial and temporal modeling of fuel and fire dynamics; and fire-global change feedbacks. He can be reached at kryan@fs.fed.us.