The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is embarking on a new journey in wildfire science by hiring a fire scientist to research how native plants react to fire conditions, and which ones are best to plant near homes. 

Kristina Fauss was hired at the garden earlier this summer, and is working on building a combustion lab to test how easily native plants catch fire, and how intensely and how long they burn.

Executive Director Steve Windhager said he’s been wanting the garden to do more research on fire prevention and restoration since he arrived 15 years ago.

“I’m just super excited that Kristina is going to help us continue to be a relevant organization to our community,” Windhager said.

“We’ve always been relevant in that we’re doing native plants, we talked about water conservation. But now we’re adding another layer of real importance to what we can offer our community.”

The issue of wildfires has hit home for the Botanic Garden, which burned twice — once in the 1964 Coyote Fire and again in the 2009 Jesusita Fire.

“I’ve always felt that fire is such an essential part of the conversation in California that the garden needed to be part of that in order to be relevant,” Windhager said.

“I wanted to make sure that we were thinking about how native plants not only regrow after a fire, but how they can be used as part of a fire-safe landscape.”

Fauss’ first major initiative will be working on the laboratory combustion-testing program, The garden recently received the funding to build the lab, which will include a chamber modeled after one Fauss designed during her Ph.D. program.

They are hoping to get the lab up and going in the next couple of months. 

Once the lab is built, Fauss said, they will be burning 15 different plant species to explore their flammability.

“The whole point of the study is to go fishing for low-flammability native species to recommend for defensible space landscaping,” Fauss said.

In previous studies, Fauss said, she found that lemonade berry did not catch well or produce large flames that burned for a long time, which is the kind of result they hope to find in other native species. 

“We see a huge range in flammability across native plants,” Fauss said. “Some burn well, some don’t burn well at all. Our initial task again is to go looking for the ones that don’t burn well, bring those to public awareness, and recommend them to the horticultural industry as low-flammability native garden plants.”

One plant that Fauss learned burns for a long time is eucalyptus. Sage also ignites easily but it doesn’t burn intensely or for very long, Fauss said.

However that doesn’t mean you can’t have any sage or eucalyptus — just make sure you have a moderate amount as the more dense it is, the more intense a fire could be. 

Fauss finished her doctorate degree earlier this year at UC Santa Barbara, where she worked in Max Moritz’s fire lab on sampling and burning vegetation to research how fire moves through the plants and what could be used in defensible space. 

Moritz, who also serves on the Botanic Garden board of trustees, said he’s been pushing for the garden to invest in studies around native plants and flammability. 

As Fauss got closer to finishing her doctoral program, they realized it was the perfect time to bring her on board at the garden, Moritz said.

“We’re all really excited about the gardens undertaking this, going in this direction and hiring Kristina,” Moritz said. “It’s a huge step in a really exciting direction.”

Before going to UCSB, Fauss got her undergraduate degree in civil engineering, and was interested in how engineering systems could restore the balance between people, nature and technology. 

“She had come from a quite different background than many of the students that I’ve worked with, who generally are interested in ecology,” Moritz said.

“But she was coming at things from sort of a systems and engineering perspective, and it looked very promising. We decided to take a gamble on accepting her as a grad student, and it really paid off.”

While studying for her undergraduate degree, Fauss was specifically interested in coastal flooding, which is an issue in her home state of Virginia. 

Then the Thomas Fire happened. 

“At the time, the fires that were happening in California were so extreme, it felt like we had never seen anything like this before,” Fauss said. “Especially the Thomas Fire was a completely unprecedented, just insane event, and at the age I was and where I was in my academic career, that hit me at a critical time.”

Fauss’ work at the garden will also include a collaboration with UCSB’s Climate and Vegetation Change Lab and CAL FIRE to evaluate if coastal live oaks can serve as barriers during wind-driven fires.

The Botanic Garden is also developing a working relationship with NASA to document the effects of the Santa Rosa Island fire that occurred earlier this year, according to Fauss. Using images captured by NASA aircraft, scientists can map the fire damage and track the recovery of island plant species. 

Community leaders were recently invited to meet Fauss and learn more about the work she’ll be doing at a community talk. Those who missed the talk can watch it here.