Danny Gogal: I want to welcome everyone to the EPA Environmental Justice Webinar Series for Federally Recognized  This is the 7th webinar that we are  and within this particular large series we have mini-series, this is the second part of a two-part series on wildfires and air quality. Today's webinar will focus on Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities, two different programs or activities that we're going to cover today. We are recording this webinar, I just want to make you all aware of that and I'm going to go ahead now and introduce our speakers. We have three individuals who will be covering the information that I just mentioned is the focus of this webinar. We have Kris Ray, who is the Air Quality Program Manager with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. We have Ana Rappold, who's a Statistician, the Office of Research and Development at the US EPA. And we have Mary Clare Hano, Environmental Health Social Scientist Office of Research and Development also with the US Environmental Protection Agency. So, without further ado I'm going to go Danny Gogal: I want to welcome everyone to the EPA Environmental Justice Webinar Series for Federally Recognized Tribes and Indigenous Peoples. This is the 7th webinar that we are holding as part of the series and within this particular large series we have mini-series, this is the second part of a two-part series on wildfires and air quality. Today's webinar will focus on Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities, two different programs or activities that we're going to cover today. We are recording this webinar, I just want to make you all aware of that and I'm going to go ahead now and introduce our speakers. We have three individuals who will be covering the information that I just mentioned is the focus of this webinar. We have Kris Ray, who is the Air Quality Program Manager with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. We have Ana Rappold, who's a Statistician, the Office of Research and Development at the US EPA. And we have Mary Clare Hano, Environmental Health Social Scientist Office of Research and Development also with the US Environmental Protection Agency. So, without further ado I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Kris.

Kris Ray: Thank you everybody for joining this webinar. I'll be talking about Smoke Ready and preparing for the next smoke event and actions to protect our community's health because we're getting lots of smoke and we just need to be aware of the health effects on this. I work for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, we're in north central Washington state, the reservation is 1.4 million acres which is pretty large for our area and it's really diverse. 3/4 of that area is forested, the rest is shrub step and so we tend to burn sometimes more than others. Last year it was around 200,000 acres and year before that was about 30,000 acres, so it varies with the fire season. So, I believe that wildfire smoke is the most important air quality issue that we face just because we're getting so much of it and at such high concentrations, so that's very important to understand for people to mitigate for our health issues. So, smoke will happen so why not plan for it? And that's part of what Smoke Ready is, it's planning for smoke events all year round. These are pictures from various years from across the reservation and different fires. The picture on the bottom left is from last summer, it was taken by a friend of mine, a homeowner on the reservation who looked back over his shoulder as they were driving out of the housing unit where they were and saw the fire coming down to burn up his house. So, I started out looking at timing of emissions within our area and wildfires-- of course, we have-- can have from June to October, mostly now, it's August, September into October and sometimes into November but not very often, but industry goes pretty much all year round  But as you can see on this, most of our non-wildfire smoke occurs during the fall and into early spring time, October through April. We have wood stove used to heat our homes, people are disposing of the wood debris in their backyards and we have agricultural fires mostly in the form of orchards in our area. And then, since we're surrounded in the valley by forest, we have a lot of prescribed fires up in the higher altitudes that may or may not affect us during the year, and the break in that is because there's too much snow on the ground in order to have a prescribed fire. So, we have data shown here from nine wildfire seasons and the percent of time the air quality was in each of the categories of the air quality index. And so, the Omak monitor is on the west side of the reservation, Twisp and Winthrop are within Okanogan County, the other monitors run by the state in our area, so we'll focus on the Omak monitor. As you can see there, about half of the years we have wildfire smoke, this is pretty extreme, it's what three  which is over 73 days I believe it is, of smoke in the moderate to hazardous categories and so that can really take an effect on our health and how we live our lives. And so, it's nice to be aware of when you get your smoke and how much smoke you actually are getting. So, Smoke Ready, I've done a lot of talking about Smoke Ready and it's-- learn something new every time, but Smoke Ready is community based not all communities are the same and the community can be defined as a reservation, a town, your neighborhood or even your household could be part of your community, so depending on how you define community all of those communities you can participate and becoming Smoke Ready. And Smoke Ready also means all sources of smoke, not just wildfire smoke. We have wood stove smoke, backyard burning smoke, industry and debris burning. So, all sources of smoke all year round because our exposure is all year round, and it's kind of a lifetime exposure too if we could keep track of that because we want to prevent health problems and we want to keep people from going to the hospital because of smoke related problems. And so, to do that as a program, we do a lot of education outreach that we give provide people to make them aware of smoke, aware of the smoke related health problems and also what kind of mitigation actions they could take in order to lower their yearly and lifetime smoke exposures. And the only way we can actually do that is working with partners, we work with partners throughout the reservation and throughout the counties to implement these education outreach programs. So, I start out the year preparing for smoke before it happens. My smoke year is divided into three sections, so I'll start with the pre-smoke event planning. I always focus on communications because it's important during stressful times, especially you have local fires and everybody's running around trying to get a handle on that and their smoke is really bad, and communication is always the first task that gets dropped in stressful situations, because it's the easiest one to drop but it's also the most important one. So, if you establish your lines of communications before the smoke event or fire and you know the people you're going to interact with, you'll have increased effectiveness and that's very important in order to get things done faster and so you can move on to the next task. But in our area, we've experienced a lot of infrastructure issues that affect our communications ability. Big fires take out electrical or electric system, you burn up 500 wooden power poles in two or three hours and you have problems, that also affects the cell towers so sometimes no electricity, no cell tower and then the internet goes out. We've even had smoke so bad that satellite internet is not working. So, communications is a big  I also I have a Monarchy network and a sensor network that I try to maintain to make sure they're functioning so I gather that data that I showed you before. Some other data that I gather-- I put together an indoor sampling toolkit so I can go around to buildings, facilities and businesses and help them understand their smoke intrusion into their buildings, and I measure the PM 2.5 carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide  and I provide them some literature and some guidance on how to manage their buildings at the same time. We also put out a lot of information during smoke events so we update all our templates and get prepared for the next season, we get together all our brochures and all our fact sheets and get those ready to go online and printed versions. But a lot of times when you get a lot of smoke in your area or you have a local fire you have an air resource advisor, so I put together a nice fact sheet for them and I update that to make sure everything's current before the fire season, that just provides air resource advisor, information about the local area and it's really helpful and it's part of that communication that is really important. So, during the wildfire smoke, as I mentioned, I go into buildings and measure some of the air smoke intrusions into those buildings and this data is from 2015 when we had a really big wildfire really close to our main government buildings. And so, I walked into my building at 6 o'clock in the morning and it was 405 micrograms per cubic meter inside the building, no doors open air conditioned shut, all the windows shut. So, there's obviously  So, it's really important to understand that. So that's one of the things I do during long smoke events, trying to make people aware of their indoor environments also. We provide a visual guide to the air quality index,  mainly because communications goes out and we have people all over the reservation that may or may not have internet and they just want an easy way to tell what their air quality is at that time and visually they can do that very easily. And of course, we promote the Smoke Sense app and it's been very successful in our area and kind of popular for the last couple years, especially when we do have smoke in the area. We'd like to do a lot of documentation and recording of what we see during the smoke event and fire events because we want to know-- learn from that and tell our story later which I'll talk about. So, we take a lot of pictures and keep a lot of documents. During smoke events we give out a lot of mask-- N95 masks with our partners. Each person that gets a mask has an opportunity to get an instruction sheet that we put together on how to use them properly and we distribute these across the reservation and we also partner with some of the local communities on and off the reservation to do that. Some of the obstacles we've found with mask is messaging, if people shouldn't wear a mask or trying to get by the belief that people with beards men with beards should not wear a mask, even though they are not 100 effective with a beard they are definitely better than no mask when you're hitting a thousand micrograms per cubic meter during the daytime and you have to be outside. So, we also put together a guide for managing buildings because we have found that a lot of people didn't think about which door to use to minimize smoke intrusion into their buildings, how to manage their air conditioning units, how to set up air cleaners or clean rooms in their offices or homes and just generally being aware that there's smoke in our buildings. Usually, before the smoke season starts I also email all the superintendents and education facilities around the outdoor activities, guys for schools, it gives them recommendations for shutdowns and how that works. Washington state Department of Health recently put that a new version of that out that's very useful if you can get a hold of that. One of the main things we promote is use of filters in our lives and that's a N95 mask is one of those filters, also the manufactured air cleaners that you can put in a room, they're good for 120 square feet, 140 square feet, they come in various sizes and shapes and filter configurations and prices. The price usually goes up for the bigger room-- bigger room sizes. Look when you buy those, look for the replacement filter price because that may sway your decisions. Also, the boxes now come usually saying that they're approved as non-ozone generators by California and so that's important to make sure there's no ionization function on there and they don't produce ozone in your small space which is also detrimental to your health. And you may need multiples of these for your house in order-- if you want to do the whole house or just one if you want to set up a cleaner room in your house. We've also promoted use of the box fan furnace filter configurations and we put out video and in the references we have that link to that because they're fairly inexpensive, they're easy to construct, they work really effectively but there is a noise level involved with that. This picture shows a box fan with two air furnace filters hooked on the back and that does about twice the amount of air as the one for filter and it's easier on the box fan. Recently, a manufacturer came up with a box fan made to put a furnace filter on and that's really exciting to see that and that will make these-- it's made for purpose and that's always better than-- do it yourself. But along with filtering your indoor air, smoke season-- wildfire season always is the hottest part of the year, so we usually get smoke in our area and it might be 105 degrees outside and smoke will last all day long and all through the night, so you can manage your windows and shades to cool your house at night and then shut your house up during the day for temperature  So, we like the use of--  in room air conditioners like shown there in the picture where it vents outside the hot air produced by the air conditioning unit, if you don't already have an air conditioner in your house, and a lot of people just don't have that capabilities in our area at this time. You also want to-- if you do have an air conditioner like a window operated model, make sure it's set on recirculation and you're managing it correctly and you know where the air is coming from. A lot of people aren't aware that your vehicle's cabin inside where you sit and drive has a filter and it's connected through your heater and air conditioning unit, so you want to make sure before smoke season that you've looked at that, checked it, make sure you put a new one in there if we're expecting a lot of smoke which we should be expecting a lot of smoke. And so, when you're in your car and you're running your air conditioning and it's smoky outside always use the recirculation option and you get 75 percent reduction of smoke in your car in about 15 minutes which is quite a long time so you have to be a long drive for that. You get less reduction when you're driving because you're forcing air into your vehicle and then just follow the manufacturer's recommendations for replacing that filter. And then when we're having smoke, you have a hard time making decisions sometimes because what we breathe does matter because you have high PM 2.5 commonly into 400 to 500 micrograms per cubic meter which is hazardous, you may have elevated carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide levels and your ozone concentrations may be higher depending on where you are in relationship to that fire. The picture of the monitoring tape there shows that when the concentration was about a thousand micrograms per cubic meter and the monitor shut down because the vacuum pump couldn't pull air through that tape in order to measure it in about 20 minutes. So, you also get a lot of stress and fatigue especially when you have local fires and you have some fire responsibility, you're working long hours, you have a bad diet lots of donuts involved there and you're preparing to evacuate, you're helping somebody evacuate or you're evacuating in local conditions. So, all those factors make it so-- you have a hard time deciding and making decisions safely. So just be aware of that-- that does affect how you behave. So, after the smoke, I also recommend people clean their buildings and homes because there's a lot of residuals and odors in there. Your walls and your carpeting and your clothing all have a smoky feel, and they smell smoky. I've had to do all that inside my house when we've had smoke problems because I didn't have an air conditioner and so we laundered all the clothes, washed everything we could, washed off the outside of the house just to get all the smoke out of it, and a lot of people use candles and air fresheners and that just masks the smoke, so cleaning is really the way to do that. And of course, if you have an air conditioning unit, you really do want to change those filters out, you can use the activated charcoal filter to help take some of the smell out of the air and if it's really bad you might consider cleaning your duct work. So, after the smoke event I also collect all my stories and information and talk to people and find out what they've learned from that smoke event because I've found that every smoke event and every wildfire season is different. There’re lessons to learn from every episode and how-- you need to get that information in order to be able to readjust for the next fires. So, I always look at new science because science is coming out every often-- quite often nowadays on wildfire smoke, it has become a very good subject matter for investigations. And then of course I look at my monitoring data to see what-- how the previous smoke season compared to other seasons and what I could learn from that. But wildfire smoke is not the only smoke problem that we have, we have wood stoves, 50 percent of our households in our area use wood as our main heating source and the chart shows that monthly averages can be into the moderate zone for the AQI for the entire month quite often. And so, you have to be aware that that is part of your smoke exposure during the year. But you can take some actions to minimize your exposure by having a stove buy back, taking stoves out of the market and recycling them, a wood stove change-out program replacing uncertified wood stoves with certified wood stoves that lowers your emissions significantly. We promote burning dry wood and we provide a lot of education and outreach to people. Also, residential vegetation backyard burning is a big factor during the winter and fall and spring, so we're also promoting alternatives to that by composting chipping, mulching or just taking the materials to the landfill, it's very important. And the chart kind of shows you the winter months of Omak monitor again and percent of time the air quality was in each category and the day, hour of the day at the bottom, and so you can see pretty much when people start heating their homes and when people get up in the morning and go to work. Also, some of those higher concentrations are affected by the backyard burning. So, some of the recommendations that I would provide people is to work with EPA on the Wildfire Smoke Ready Site Content and the Smoke Sense app, those are very important tools for us. I work with all our other federal partners such as FEMA, I guess red cross is in their HUD, some of those departments to look at smoke issues that they can help us with and promote awareness that smoke from all sources can affect our health, highlight the impacts of long-term consequences of smoke exposure. Our smoke events are lasting up to two, three weeks into the unhealthy to hazardous categories and so that's a long-term impact where everybody's going to have consequences for many months after those events. And climate change is an important contributor to our big fires in our area because we're having wind-driven fires that is climate change-- results from climate change. And also, we want to look at our-- consider our homes and businesses for smoke intrusion and figure out ways to evaluate those. I found a good guide for evaluating our buildings for smoke intrusion. And I'd like to add a new category to the air quality index called catastrophic about 500 micrograms per cubic meter because of the consequences of those high concentrations which we never saw 20 years ago but we are seeing now. So, thank you for letting me speak and listening and I think this is an important subject as well as a lot of other people do too and so I'm looking forward to the conversation, and I've provided a few references for you that you'll be getting when you get the slide there. Kris Ray: Thank you everybody for joining this webinar. I'll be talking about Smoke Ready and preparing for the next smoke event and actions to protect our community's health because we're getting lots of smoke and we just need to be aware of the health effects on this. I work for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, we're in north central Washington state, the reservation is 1.4 million acres which is pretty large for our area and it's really diverse. 3/4 of that area is forested, the rest is shrub step and so we tend to burn sometimes more than others. Last year it was around 200,000 acres and year before that was about 30,000 acres, so it varies with the fire season. So, I believe that wildfire smoke is the most important air quality issue that we face just because we're getting so much of it and at such high concentrations, so that's very important to understand for people to mitigate for our health issues. So, smoke will happen so why not plan for it? And that's part of what Smoke Ready is, it's planning for smoke events all year round. These are pictures from various years from across the reservation and different fires. The picture on the bottom left is from last summer, it was taken by a friend of mine, a homeowner on the reservation who looked back over his shoulder as they were driving out of the housing unit where they were and saw the fire coming down to burn up his house. So, I started out looking at timing of emissions within our area and wildfires-- of course, we have-- can have from June to October, mostly now, it's August, September into October and sometimes into November but not very often, but industry goes pretty much all year round if you have problems with industrial areas. But as you can see on this, most of our non-wildfire smoke occurs during the fall and into early spring time, October through April. We have wood stove used to heat our homes, people are disposing of the wood debris in their backyards and we have agricultural fires mostly in the form of orchards in our area. And then, since we're surrounded in the valley by forest, we have a lot of prescribed fires up in the higher altitudes that may or may not affect us during the year, and the break in that is because there's too much snow on the ground in order to have a prescribed fire. So, we have data shown here from nine wildfire seasons and the percent of time the air quality was in each of the categories of the air quality index. And so, the Omak monitor is on the west side of the reservation, Twisp and Winthrop are within Okanogan County, the other monitors run by the state in our area, so we'll focus on the Omak monitor. As you can see there, about half of the years we have wildfire smoke, this is pretty extreme, it's what three of those are over 20 percent of the year which is over 73 days I believe it is, of smoke in the moderate to hazardous categories and so that can really take an effect on our health and how we live our lives. And so, it's nice to be aware of when you get your smoke and how much smoke you actually are getting. So, Smoke Ready, I've done a lot of talking about Smoke Ready and it's-- learn something new every time, but Smoke Ready is community based not all communities are the same and the community can be defined as a reservation, a town, your neighborhood or even your household could be part of your community, so depending on how you define community all of those communities you can participate and become Smoke Ready. And Smoke Ready also means all sources of smoke, not just wildfire smoke. We have wood stove smoke, backyard burning smoke, industry and debris burning. So, all sources of smoke all year round because our exposure is all year round, and it's kind of a lifetime exposure too if we could keep track of that because we want to prevent health problems and we want to keep people from going to the hospital because of smoke related problems. And so, to do that as a program, we do a lot of education outreach that we give provide people to make them aware of smoke, aware of the smoke related health problems and also what kind of mitigation actions they could take in order to lower their yearly and lifetime smoke exposures. And the only way we can actually do that is working with partners, we work with partners throughout the reservation and throughout the counties to implement these education outreach programs. So, I start out the year preparing for smoke before it happens. My smoke year is divided into three sections, so I'll start with the pre-smoke event planning. I always focus on communications because it's important during stressful times, especially you have local fires and everybody's running around trying to get a handle on that and their smoke is really bad, and communication is always the first task that gets dropped in stressful situations, because it's the easiest one to drop but it's also the most important one. So, if you establish your lines of communications before the smoke event or fire and you know the people you're going to interact with, you'll have increased effectiveness and that's very important in order to get things done faster and so you can move on to the next task. But in our area, we've experienced a lot of infrastructure issues that affect our communications ability. Big fires take out electrical or electric system, you burn up 500 wooden power poles in two or three hours and you have problems, that also affects the cell towers so sometimes no electricity, no cell tower and then the internet goes out. We've even had smoke so bad that satellite internet is not working. So, communications is a big part of planning for the next fire event. I also I have a Monarchy network and a sensor network that I try to maintain to make sure they're functioning so I gather that data that I showed you before. Some other data that I gather-- I put together an indoor sampling toolkit so I can go around to buildings, facilities and businesses and help them understand their smoke intrusion into their buildings, and I measure the PM 2.5 carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide  and I provide them some literature and some guidance on how to manage their buildings at the same time. We also put out a lot of information during smoke events so we update all our templates and get prepared for the next season, we get together all our brochures and all our fact sheets and get those ready to go online and printed versions. But a lot of times when you get a lot of smoke in your area or you have a local fire you have an air resource advisor, so I put together a nice fact sheet for them and I update that to make sure everything's current before the fire season, that just provides air resource advisor, information about the local area and it's really helpful and it's part of that communication that is really important. So, during the wildfire smoke, as I mentioned, I go into buildings and measure some of the air smoke intrusions into those buildings and this data is from 2015 when we had a really big wildfire really close to our main government buildings. And so, I walked into my building at 6 o'clock in the morning and it was 405 micrograms per cubic meter inside the building, no doors open air conditioned shut, all the windows shut. So, there's obviously smoke intrusion into all that. So, it's really important to understand that. So that's one of the things I do during long smoke events, trying to make people aware of their indoor environments also. We provide a visual guide to the air quality index,  mainly because communications goes out and we have people all over the reservation that may or may not have internet and they just want an easy way to tell what their air quality is at that time and visually they can do that very easily. And of course, we promote the Smoke Sense app and it's been very successful in our area and kind of popular for the last couple years, especially when we do have smoke in the area. We'd like to do a lot of documentation and recording of what we see during the smoke event and fire events because we want to know-- learn from that and tell our story later which I'll talk about. So, we take a lot of pictures and keep a lot of documents. During smoke events we give out a lot of mask-- N95 masks with our partners. Each person that gets a mask has an opportunity to get an instruction sheet that we put together on how to use them properly and we distribute these across the reservation and we also partner with some of the local communities on and off the reservation to do that. Some of the obstacles we've found with mask is messaging, if people shouldn't wear a mask or trying to get by the belief that people with beards men with beards should not wear a mask, even though they are not 100 effective with a beard they are definitely better than no mask when you're hitting a thousand micrograms per cubic meter during the daytime and you have to be outside. So, we also put together a guide for managing buildings because we have found that a lot of people didn't think about which door to use to minimize smoke intrusion into their buildings, how to manage their air conditioning units, how to set up air cleaners or clean rooms in their offices or homes and just generally being aware that there's smoke in our buildings. Usually, before the smoke season starts I also email all the superintendents and education facilities around the outdoor activities, guys for schools, it gives them recommendations for shutdowns and how that works. Washington state Department of Health recently put that a new version of that out that's very useful if you can get a hold of that. One of the main things we promote is use of filters in our lives and that's a N95 mask is one of those filters, also the manufactured air cleaners that you can put in a room, they're good for 120 square feet, 140 square feet, they come in various sizes and shapes and filter configurations and prices. The price usually goes up for the bigger room-- bigger room sizes. Look when you buy those, look for the replacement filter price because that may sway your decisions. Also, the boxes now come usually saying that they're approved as non-ozone generators by California and so that's important to make sure there's no ionization function on there and they don't produce ozone in your small space which is also detrimental to your health. And you may need multiples of these for your house in order-- if you want to do the whole house or just one if you want to set up a cleaner room in your house. We've also promoted use of the box fan furnace filter configurations and we put out video and in the references we have that link to that because they're fairly inexpensive, they're easy to construct, they work really effectively but there is a noise level involved with that. This picture shows a box fan with two air furnace filters hooked on the back and that does about twice the amount of air as the one for filter and it's easier on the box fan. Recently, a manufacturer came up with a box fan made to put a furnace filter on and that's really exciting to see that and that will make these-- it's made for purpose and that's always better than-- do it yourself. But along with filtering your indoor air, smoke season-- wildfire season always is the hottest part of the year, so we usually get smoke in our area and it might be 105 degrees outside and smoke will last all day long and all through the night, so you can manage your windows and shades to cool your house at night and then shut your house up during the day for temperature because there's just too much smoke. So, we like the use of--  in room air conditioners like shown there in the picture where it vents outside the hot air produced by the air conditioning unit, if you don't already have an air conditioner in your house, and a lot of people just don't have that capabilities in our area at this time. You also want to-- if you do have an air conditioner like a window operated model, make sure it's set on recirculation and you're managing it correctly and you know where the air is coming from. A lot of people aren't aware that your vehicle's cabin inside where you sit and drive has a filter and it's connected through your heater and air conditioning unit, so you want to make sure before smoke season that you've looked at that, checked it, make sure you put a new one in there if we're expecting a lot of smoke which we should be expecting a lot of smoke. And so, when you're in your car and you're running your air conditioning and it's smoky outside always use the recirculation option and you get 75 percent reduction of smoke in your car in about 15 minutes which is quite a long time so you have to be a long drive for that. You get less reduction when you're driving because you're forcing air into your vehicle and then just follow the manufacturer's recommendations for replacing that filter. And then when we're having smoke, you have a hard time making decisions sometimes because what we breathe does matter because you have high PM 2.5 commonly into 400 to 500 micrograms per cubic meter which is hazardous, you may have elevated carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide levels and your ozone concentrations may be higher depending on where you are in relationship to that fire. The picture of the monitoring tape there shows that when the concentration was about a thousand micrograms per cubic meter and the monitor shut down because the vacuum pump couldn't pull air through that tape in order to measure it in about 20 minutes. So, you also get a lot of stress and fatigue especially when you have local fires and you have some fire responsibility, you're working long hours, you have a bad diet lots of donuts involved there and you're preparing to evacuate, you're helping somebody evacuate or you're evacuating in local conditions. So, all those factors make it so-- you have a hard time deciding and making decisions safely. So just be aware of that-- that does affect how you behave. So, after the smoke, I also recommend people clean their buildings and homes because there's a lot of residuals and odors in there. Your walls and your carpeting and your clothing all have a smoky feel, and they smell smoky. I've had to do all that inside my house when we've had smoke problems because I didn't have an air conditioner and so we laundered all the clothes, washed everything we could, washed off the outside of the house just to get all the smoke out of it, and a lot of people use candles and air fresheners and that just masks the smoke, so cleaning is really the way to do that. And of course, if you have an air conditioning unit, you really do want to change those filters out, you can use the activated charcoal filter to help take some of the smell out of the air and if it's really bad you might consider cleaning your duct work. So, after the smoke event I also collect all my stories and information and talk to people and find out what they've learned from that smoke event because I've found that every smoke event and every wildfire season is different. There’re lessons to learn from every episode and how-- you need to get that information in order to be able to readjust for the next fires. So, I always look at new science because science is coming out every often-- quite often nowadays on wildfire smoke, it has become a very good subject matter for investigations. And then of course I look at my monitoring data to see what-- how the previous smoke season compared to other seasons and what I could learn from that. But wildfire smoke is not the only smoke problem that we have, we have wood stoves, 50 percent of our households in our area use wood as our main heating source and the chart shows that monthly averages can be into the moderate zone for the AQI for the entire month quite often. And so, you have to be aware that that is part of your smoke exposure during the year. But you can take some actions to minimize your exposure by having a stove buy back, taking stoves out of the market and recycling them, a wood stove change-out program replacing uncertified wood stoves with certified wood stoves that lowers your emissions significantly. We promote burning dry wood and we provide a lot of education and outreach to people. Also, residential vegetation backyard burning is a big factor during the winter and fall and spring, so we're also promoting alternatives to that by composting chipping, mulching or just taking the materials to the landfill, it's very important. And the chart kind of shows you the winter months of Omak monitor again and percent of time the air quality was in each category and the day, hour of the day at the bottom, and so you can see pretty much when people start heating their homes and when people get up in the morning and go to work. Also, some of those higher concentrations are affected by the backyard burning. So, some of the recommendations that I would provide people is to work with EPA on the Wildfire Smoke Ready Site Content and the Smoke Sense app, those are very important tools for us. I work with all our other federal partners such as FEMA, I guess red cross is in their HUD, some of those departments to look at smoke issues that they can help us with and promote awareness that smoke from all sources can affect our health, highlight the impacts of long-term consequences of smoke exposure. Our smoke events are lasting up to two, three weeks into the unhealthy to hazardous categories and so that's a long-term impact where everybody's going to have consequences for many months after those events. And climate change is an important contributor to our big fires in our area because we're having wind-driven fires that is climate change-- results from climate change. And also, we want to look at our-- consider our homes and businesses for smoke intrusion and figure out ways to evaluate those. I found a good guide for evaluating our buildings for smoke intrusion. And I'd like to add a new category to the air quality index called catastrophic about 500 micrograms per cubic meter because of the consequences of those high concentrations which we never saw 20 years ago but we are seeing now. So, thank you for letting me speak and listening and I think this is an important subject as well as a lot of other people do too and so I'm looking forward to the conversation, and I've provided a few references for you that you'll be getting when you get the slide there. So, thank you very much.

Ana Rappold: Thank you, Kris. Hi everyone I am Ana Rappold and I'm a Statistician and a Branch Chief of Clinical Research with the Office of Research and Development. I'm gonna share with you some of our experiences and what we have learned during the Smoke Sense project. And then after me Mary Clare will talk about Smoke Ready Communities project. But before we go into the presentation I just want to say thank you for your attention and all the contribution that you have made if you participated in one of these projects already, but also to thank our team members, we have many team members Mary Clare included, Steve Prince, Linda Whey and many others who make Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities possible. Let me just orient myself, I'm going to turn off my camera for the size of the file and like less distraction for myself. So, as Kris has talked about, we have changes in fire seasons and fire main-- one of the main components of smoke is fine particulate matter which has been causally associated with the range of adverse health outcomes and this is actually kind of the bulk of my own research prior to getting engaged with wildfire research as well as many of our colleagues. At EPA, we study the effect of particulate matter, PM for short on health. And as-- But we started our research with wildfire smoke about 10 years ago and it has really evolved from studying the health effects to thinking what can we do about reducing health outcomes and improving the public health outcomes in the communities. We've noticed that in response to the intrusion of smoke into our communities, both individuals and organizations are responding largely through health risk communication campaigns, type of what Kris Ray has just shared with us. And when you think about wildfire smoke it's like a big complicated puzzle with many pieces and we know that communication is an important part particularly on that health effects study because most people don't-- because it's a health effect-- health hazard but it's also that people don't have often a lot of experiences with smoke. This kind of health risk communication has a well-developed history and the theory and conventional practice related to public health risk communication suggests that both the content and the context of the messaging plays an important role in the effectiveness of that messaging to elicit desired behaviors and different contexts may require different content. In other words, what the messaging says is important of course but it's also important to understand social and environmental circumstances or conditions in which the messaging is communicating. So, if you think about analogy in our family conversations-- for example, in my own family I don't talk to all my children the same way because they respond to different content of the same message and I also don't bring up certain topics when the context is not right because my message will not be interpreted the right way. And that works at all kinds of levels of communication and wildfire and public health is no different. So, this central to understanding the context are the people who are the intended audience for this messaging including their lived experiences and perspectives on the issue. But the challenge with wildfire smoke is that this intended audience can be pretty wide ranging and they could have multitude of different experiences. They certainly include multiple communities, multiple regions and multiple states that share different background and history with the issue. So, the question arises given these challenges, how do we do this critical health risk communication in a way that makes sense and is useful to the intended audiences and integrates the wealth of guidance from field of health risk communication to make the health risk communication more effective? During smoke, we have a lot of different-- we have a lot of this-- we have desire to end the need to integrate highly complex information into a single message, so it's a very difficult job to do when your first-time experiencing smoke. Unfortunately, when you experience smoke over time like Kris Ray and his community has experienced, the communities become organized and prepare smoke ready plans and so forth but first time around is really difficult. So, my presentation is about Smoke Sense which is just one small piece of that big puzzle about health risk communication and it's a citizen science project that aims to better understand the context in which Smoke Sense participants may be receiving and interpreting health risk communication. The objective with Smoke Sense-- we aim to be part of the conversation that reduces health effects in the communities. What we-- through participation in the project we aim to address the gap between the recommended actions and the observed public health outcomes, understand where is that gap and how can we shrink that gap. Increase issue engagement and inform ways to improve effectiveness of health risk communication particularly on app-based platforms. The method for Smoke Sense is funded on-- primarily on the use of mobile app but there's also a number of other projects that have evolved around Smoke Sense that supports this overall objective. And before I go any further I just want to show you a little bit of a timeline of how this project has evolved because certainly this is something that we previously didn't have experience with and it was our first attempt, but we first launched the study in 2017 and Kris Ray and his community have been one of our pilot, main pilot community from which we received a lot of feedback and we use that concept in the following years where we run-- we go through the smoke season, every year it's in different part of the country, sometimes it's up north sometimes it's in California. At the end of the season we look at the data, we look at the input from our stakeholders in the communities and users, then we revise, we you know we strategize a little bit for the next season and then we redeploy the app and we follow this pattern from year to year and now the new Smoke Sense app will be released probably in June, 2021. From the-- let me just actually go to this slide and then I'll go back to the other slide. The participation can, in the project, take several forms. The users can explore air quality, current and future air quality, the status of fires, the status of smoke plumes, they can receive health risk messaging ways or how to-- recommended actions on how to reduce smoke exposure, but they can also engage in a more-- deeper level where they engage with the learning modules and by reporting their observations and contributing to knowledge base. They report observations about the smoke, about the health symptoms as well as the actions they have taken. In this slide, you can see a few screenshots. The first slide is the main dashboard which is divided into three sections. The top is the AQI, if you press anywhere on that AQI portion of the dashboard, you will see a pop-up window that you can actually see in the second image with the explanation of air quality index and explanation who is at risk and what actions should be taken. Then the middle of the dashboard contains four titles, one is to report observations, one is--provides map with status of the fires, smoke plumes like you can see in the third image and then the bottom two are the learning modules. And then the third section of the dashboard is the ribbon that you can see in orange at the bottom, where you can learn more about the study-- look at the badges you have received and then you can also see summary of the data that all the users combine have reported. That would be an example of that-- would be the fourth image on this slide. The important thing is here to note that all the information that's integrated in the app is already available. Smoke Sense just puts together these resources in one place and makes them available and accessible to an individual when and where they're experiencing smoke. The ultimate goal is to support engagement and learn how we respond to information and how to improve app-based communication to be effective at improving health outcomes. Okay now-- I apologize for this, but just to mention from individual level participation-- for all participation is anonymous, individuals don't download the app, they're asked to review informed consent, they provide a zip code to anchor their air quality information and they complete My Profile section, and then that allows them to use the app in which includes again Fire and Smoke Near Me section, Air Quality Index section, learning modules as well as the module that allows you to report your observations. And for different level of interaction with the app users earn badges so there's like a user badge, explorer badge, observer badge and a learner badge. We have a new badge coming up in the new season. Now I wanna-- kind of skip over a year of events and go straight into what did we learn from our pilot season. Pilot season was run in 2017 late in the season, and very quickly, very much thanks to Kris Ray and his efforts, we managed but also unfortunately due to wildfires-- we managed to get 5,000 participants engaged in reporting. What we learned is that there's a very strong demand for understanding air quality, we also learned that almost all participants had a very good understanding of smoke as an exposure-- environmental exposure and a health risk, and 89 percent of participants responded taking action to reduce smoke exposure. However, what we did notice is that many participants recognize smoke as a health risk in general but did not interpret or interpret it too much lower extent as a health risk to themselves, so personal risk. You know one of those things where you know something is bad but it's not going to happen to me type of thing. And some of this is true, we know that there's people who are at higher risk but smoke really can affect every-- so relatively speaking there can be higher risk among certain individuals, for example if you have asthma but smoke has an effect on all individuals. And even though health was the reason most participants enrolled in the study or participated in the study, we did not find evidence that the health status-- so how many symptoms do you-- or what pre-existing conditions you have did not determine how we respond to smoke. So largely, we learned that we respond to smoke to reduce symptoms rather than to prevent symptoms. And if we think about it health risk communication, the ultimate goal is to bring about interpretation of the message to induce a person to act, to prevent symptoms rather than to be reducing symptoms, when possible of course, that's not always possible. So, in the subsequent--  we had had a couple of suggestions, insights on what could improve the content of the health risk messages, that then be followed up in different research areas. one, is to really focus on the personal relevance of the factors that people identify with, and second, to provide evidence that behavioral change is beneficial. So, if HEPA filter-- a lot of people have never used HEPA filter, the evidence that HEPA filter works, specific evidence does make, we believe an impact on an individual. That was our hypothesis but we wanted to explore this further, so in the communication, in the next portion of the research aim we looked into the perspectives that people have on this issue of wildfire smoke and health. Is there a single perspective on the issue? Does everyone agree on it or is there a multitude of perspectives? And then we try to relate these perspectives to the existing theories of individual level health behavior change because that can help us then provide framework on how the content of the messages can be constructed effectively. What we did with this analysis was-- we used different perspective, measures on perspectives which were determined by response to the questions in the app that relate to personal health access to exposure-reducing resources, measures of self-efficacy, perceptions of smoke as a health risk and other questions that all related to what perspectives do you have on the issue, and what we found is that there's about five major traits among these perspectives collectively, and then we mapped them, we gave them names so there is a group-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] called on one end of the spectrum, unengaged they tended to be mostly younger, very physically active, they have completely low perception of risk and they're not engaged with the issue. Then on the other side of the spectrum is those who have already decided to act, those would be-- we call them protectors because all they need is like call to action and they know what to do and how to protect themselves, so they just need to know if in the analogy of the weather that tomorrow it's going to rain I'm going to bring an umbrella, but in the middle is this-- where most health risk communication is targeted is in this group of individuals who are deciding on the issue. And we identified kind of three groups of people, cautious, proactive, susceptible but I'm not gonna go in very much detail. The idea is that mapping these traits to the Precaution Adoption Process Model, helps us understand where are individuals in the decision-making process, and that knowledge can identify messaging the contact of the message-- content of the message that may be perceived as relevant. For example, individuals who may have low self-efficacy for reducing their exposure may not believe that they can do actually something about it, like "Well, I know French fries are bad but what can I do about it, they're here I'm gonna eat it." So, the message contact-- content that would be beneficial in that context is the messages that really focus that these certain actions are within the sphere of influence for those individuals and that there isn't that-- the impact will be beneficial of taking action. So, to summarize, among this sample of individuals, participants in the Smoke Sense we identified factors such as health status, risk perception, informational needs and access to exposure reducing resources, really differentiated-- had an important role in differentiated perspectives on the issue. and these different groups engaged with the app differently. Some groups engaged with the app to deeper level, through learning and through reporting than others. By positioning these perspectives on the Precaution Adoption Process Model, we illuminate where each group may be with respect to adopting exposure reducing health behavior. Of course, we have to understand that there are some limitations because this is kind of a self-reported data, so it may not be generalizable to entire population but participation in Smoke Sense is growing from season to season, now we have 45,000 users who-- and many of them who report regularly. And also, there could be additional factors that we didn't think about as a research group that could inform perspectives but were not included or these factors could also change over time because our wildfire smoke seasons are changing so much over time. And finally, to bring it back  as we move forward, we aim to best tailor health to its messaging, to each prospective groups. We think that that can have an effective-- that can be effective into getting us to where we want to be. Some examples we consider are listed in these tables like again, these are five groups from protector to unengaged suggesting what health risk messaging should be used based on previous theories that have been explored in other contexts. Now this is a really complex issue, wildfire smoke and public health is-- it's very difficult to understand all the context and put all the information into one single clear actionable and accessible message. That perception of risk for some individuals, most individuals probably is really tough to access in our consciousness right. Very few of us think about smoke-- what would we do if we were exposed to smoke but we know that that contemplation before something happens really can impact on us doing the right thing when it actually happens. That's really the crux of what we're trying to study. At the same time that we have this evolving challenges where risk communication platforms are evolving, there's-- people get information from so many different sources, that's also another angle and for research and then to mention that it's really difficult to provide specific evidence of the benefit for behavioral change. We recognize that through some of this research, and we have quite a few studies now, this observation really motivated us to conduct some of the studies that historically we probably would have not undertaken. And finally, before I turn it over to-- I have one more slide but this one-- I do want to say that we took citizen science approach, we didn't have experience with citizen science approach before but we really think that it's an approach that develops points of entry into contributing to research and engaging with the process and the data for members of the public that is difficult to access otherwise. It's mutually beneficial because it helps EPA answer the questions but it also allows for public input and it's beneficial to individuals to have access to this information. It also allows for two-way communication as mentioned earlier but this-- Kris Ray, for example, and his community has provided us a lot of feedback in our pilot years that we really try to take-- we can't always address all the shortcomings but every year we really try to strategize on what we can address for the next year and chip away year by year. And then finally citizen science is really an ultimate example of science that fosters change in the communities and embeds that supports that data and knowledge sharing. There's [CLEARING THROAT] through these last three or four years we've also developed quite a bit of side projects that are related to Smoke Sense in that have taken out-- taken new interesting directions and I'm just going to leave it here at that and let Mary Clare then Ana Rappold: Thank you, Kris. Hi everyone I am Ana Rappold and I'm a Statistician and a Branch Chief of Clinical Research with the Office of Research and Development. I'm going to share with you some of our experiences and what we have learned during the Smoke Sense project. And then after me Mary Clare will talk about Smoke Ready Communities project. But before we go into the presentation I just want to say thank you for your attention and all the contribution that you have made if you participated in one of these projects already, but also to thank our team members, we have many team members Mary Clare included, Steve Prince, Linda Whey and many others who make Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities possible. Let me just orient myself, I'm going to turn off my camera for the size of the file and like less distraction for myself. So, as Kris has talked about, we have changes in fire seasons and fire main-- one of the main components of smoke is fine particulate matter which has been causally associated with the range of adverse health outcomes and this is actually kind of the bulk of my own research prior to getting engaged with wildfire research as well as many of our colleagues. At EPA, we study the effect of particulate matter, PM for short on health. And as-- But we started our research with wildfire smoke about 10 years ago and it has really evolved from studying the health effects to thinking what can we do about reducing health outcomes and improving the public health outcomes in the communities. We've noticed that in response to the intrusion of smoke into our communities, both individuals and organizations are responding largely through health risk communication campaigns, type of what Kris Ray has just shared with us. And when you think about wildfire smoke it's like a big complicated puzzle with many pieces and we know that communication is an important part particularly on that health effects study because most people don't-- because it's a health effect-- health hazard but it's also that people don't have often a lot of experiences with smoke. This kind of health risk communication has a well-developed history and the theory and conventional practice related to public health risk communication suggests that both the content and the context of the messaging plays an important role in the effectiveness of that messaging to elicit desired behaviors and different contexts may require different content. In other words, what the messaging says is important of course but it's also important to understand social and environmental circumstances or conditions in which the messaging is communicating. So, if you think about analogy in our family conversations-- for example, in my own family I don't talk to all my children the same way because they respond to different content of the same message and I also don't bring up certain topics when the context is not right because my message will not be interpreted the right way. And that works at all kinds of levels of communication and wildfire and public health is no different. So, this central to understanding the context are the people who are the intended audience for this messaging including their lived experiences and perspectives on the issue. But the challenge with wildfire smoke is that this intended audience can be pretty wide ranging and they could have multitude of different experiences. They certainly include multiple communities, multiple regions and multiple states that share different background and history with the issue. So, the question arises given these challenges, how do we do this critical health risk communication in a way that makes sense and is useful to the intended audiences and integrates the wealth of guidance from field of health risk communication to make the health risk communication more effective? During smoke, we have a lot of different-- we have a lot of this-- we have desire to end the need to integrate highly complex information into a single message, so it's a very difficult job to do when your first-time experiencing smoke. Unfortunately, when you experience smoke over time like Kris Ray and his community has experienced, the communities become organized and prepare smoke ready plans and so forth but first time around is really difficult. So, my presentation is about Smoke Sense which is just one small piece of that big puzzle about health risk communication and it's a citizen science project that aims to better understand the context in which Smoke Sense participants may be receiving and interpreting health risk communication. The objective with Smoke Sense-- we aim to be part of the conversation that reduces health effects in the communities. What we-- through participation in the project we aim to address the gap between the recommended actions and the observed public health outcomes, understand where is that gap and how can we shrink that gap. Increase issue engagement and inform ways to improve effectiveness of health risk communication particularly on app-based platforms. The method for Smoke Sense is funded on-- primarily on the use of mobile app but there's also a number of other projects that have evolved around Smoke Sense that supports this overall objective. And before I go any further I just want to show you a little bit of a timeline of how this project has evolved because certainly this is something that we previously didn't have experience with and it was our first attempt, but we first launched the study in 2017 and Kris Ray and his community have been one of our pilot, main pilot community from which we received a lot of feedback and we use that concept in the following years where we run-- we go through the smoke season, every year it's in different part of the country, sometimes it's up north sometimes it's in California. At the end of the season we look at the data, we look at the input from our stakeholders in the communities and users, then we revise, we you know we strategize a little bit for the next season and then we redeploy the app and we follow this pattern from year to year and now the new Smoke Sense app will be released probably in June, 2021. From the-- let me just actually go to this slide and then I'll go back to the other slide. The participation can, in the project, take several forms. The users can explore air quality, current and future air quality, the status of fires, the status of smoke plumes, they can receive health risk messaging ways or how to-- recommended actions on how to reduce smoke exposure, but they can also engage in a more-- deeper level where they engage with the learning modules and by reporting their observations and contributing to knowledge base. They report observations about the smoke, about the health symptoms as well as the actions they have taken. In this slide, you can see a few screenshots. The first slide is the main dashboard which is divided into three sections. The top is the AQI, if you press anywhere on that AQI portion of the dashboard, you will see a pop-up window that you can actually see in the second image with the explanation of air quality index and explanation who is at risk and what actions should be taken. Then the middle of the dashboard contains four titles, one is to report observations, one is--provides map with status of the fires, smoke plumes like you can see in the third image and then the bottom two are the learning modules. And then the third section of the dashboard is the ribbon that you can see in orange at the bottom, where you can learn more about the study-- look at the badges you have received and then you can also see summary of the data that all the users combine have reported. That would be an example of that-- would be the fourth image on this slide. The important thing is here to note that all the information that's integrated in the app is already available. Smoke Sense just puts together these resources in one place and makes them available and accessible to an individual when and where they're experiencing smoke. The ultimate goal is to support engagement and learn how we respond to information and how to improve app-based communication to be effective at improving health outcomes. Okay now-- I apologize for this, but just to mention from individual level participation-- for all participation is anonymous, individuals don't download the app, they're asked to review informed consent, they provide a zip code to anchor their air quality information and they complete My Profile section, and then that allows them to use the app in which includes again Fire and Smoke Near Me section, Air Quality Index section, learning modules as well as the module that allows you to report your observations. And for different level of interaction with the app users earn badges so there's like a user badge, explorer badge, observer badge and a learner badge. We have a new badge coming up in the new season. Now I wanna-- kind of skip over a year of events and go straight into what did we learn from our pilot season. Pilot season was run in 2017 late in the season, and very quickly, very much thanks to Kris Ray and his efforts, we managed but also unfortunately due to wildfires-- we managed to get 5,000 participants engaged in reporting. What we learned is that there's a very strong demand for understanding air quality, we also learned that almost all participants had a very good understanding of smoke as an exposure-- environmental exposure and a health risk, and 89 percent of participants responded taking action to reduce smoke exposure. However, what we did notice is that many participants recognize smoke as a health risk in general but did not interpret or interpret it too much lower extent as a health risk to themselves, so personal risk. You know one of those things where you know something is bad but it's not going to happen to me type of thing. And some of this is true, we know that there's people who are at higher risk but smoke really can affect every-- so relatively speaking there can be higher risk among certain individuals, for example if you have asthma but smoke has an effect on all individuals. And even though health was the reason most participants enrolled in the study or participated in the study, we did not find evidence that the health status-- so how many symptoms do you-- or what pre-existing conditions you have did not determine how we respond to smoke. So largely, we learned that we respond to smoke to reduce symptoms rather than to prevent symptoms. And if we think about it health risk communication, the ultimate goal is to bring about interpretation of the message to induce a person to act, to prevent symptoms rather than to be reducing symptoms, when possible of course, that's not always possible. So, in the subsequent--  we had had a couple of suggestions, insights on what could improve the content of the health risk messages, that then be followed up in different research areas. one, is to really focus on the personal relevance of the factors that people identify with, and second, to provide evidence that behavioral change is beneficial. So, if HEPA filter-- a lot of people have never used HEPA filter, the evidence that HEPA filter works, specific evidence does make, we believe an impact on an individual. That was our hypothesis but we wanted to explore this further, so in the communication, in the next portion of the research aim we looked into the perspectives that people have on this issue of wildfire smoke and health. Is there a single perspective on the issue? Does everyone agree on it or is there a multitude of perspectives? And then we try to relate these perspectives to the existing theories of individual level health behavior change because that can help us then provide framework on how the content of the messages can be constructed effectively. What we did with this analysis was-- we used different perspective, measures on perspectives which were determined by response to the questions in the app that relate to personal health access to exposure-reducing resources, measures of self-efficacy, perceptions of smoke as a health risk and other questions that all related to what perspectives do you have on the issue, and what we found is that there's about five major traits among these perspectives collectively, and then we mapped them, we gave them names so there is a group was called one end of the spectrum, unengaged they tended to be mostly younger, very physically active, they have completely low perception of risk and they're not engaged with the issue. Then on the other side of the spectrum is those who have already decided to act, those would be-- we call them protectors because all they need is like call to action and they know what to do and how to protect themselves, so they just need to know if in the analogy of the weather that tomorrow it's going to rain I'm going to bring an umbrella, but in the middle is this-- where most health risk communication is targeted is in this group of individuals who are deciding on the issue. And we identified kind of three groups of people, cautious, proactive, susceptible but I'm not gonna go in very much detail. The idea is that mapping these traits to the Precaution Adoption Process Model, helps us understand where are individuals in the decision-making process, and that knowledge can identify messaging the contact of the message-- content of the message that may be perceived as relevant. For example, individuals who may have low self-efficacy for reducing their exposure may not believe that they can do actually something about it, like "Well, I know French fries are bad but what can I do about it, they're here I'm gonna eat it." So, the message contact-- content that would be beneficial in that context is the messages that really focus that these certain actions are within the sphere of influence for those individuals and that there isn't that-- the impact will be beneficial of taking action. So, to summarize, among this sample of individuals, participants in the Smoke Sense we identified factors such as health status, risk perception, informational needs and access to exposure reducing resources, really differentiated-- had an important role in differentiated perspectives on the issue. and these different groups engaged with the app differently. Some groups engaged with the app to deeper level, through learning and through reporting than others. By positioning these perspectives on the Precaution Adoption Process Model, we illuminate where each group may be with respect to adopting exposure reducing health behavior. Of course, we have to understand that there are some limitations because this is kind of a self-reported data, so it may not be generalizable to entire population but participation in Smoke Sense is growing from season to season, now we have 45,000 users who-- and many of them who report regularly. And also, there could be additional factors that we didn't think about as a research group that could inform perspectives but were not included or these factors could also change over time because our wildfire smoke seasons are changing so much over time. And finally, to bring it back home of about this study is as we move forward, we aim to best tailor health to its messaging, to each prospective groups. We think that that can have an effective-- that can be effective into getting us to where we want to be. Some examples we consider are listed in these tables like again, these are five groups from protector to unengaged suggesting what health risk messaging should be used based on previous theories that have been explored in other contexts. Now this is a really complex issue, wildfire smoke and public health is-- it's very difficult to understand all the context and put all the information into one single clear actionable and accessible message. That perception of risk for some individuals, most individuals probably is really tough to access in our consciousness right. Very few of us think about smoke-- what would we do if we were exposed to smoke but we know that that contemplation before something happens really can impact on us doing the right thing when it actually happens. That's really the crux of what we're trying to study. At the same time that we have this evolving challenges where risk communication platforms are evolving, there's-- people get information from so many different sources, that's also another angle and for research and then to mention that it's really difficult to provide specific evidence of the benefit for behavioral change. We recognize that through some of this research, and we have quite a few studies now, this observation really motivated us to conduct some of the studies that historically we probably would have not undertaken. And finally, before I turn it over to-- I have one more slide but this one-- I do want to say that we took citizen science approach, we didn't have experience with citizen science approach before but we really think that it's an approach that develops points of entry into contributing to research and engaging with the process and the data for members of the public that is difficult to access otherwise. It's mutually beneficial because it helps EPA answer the questions but it also allows for public input and it's beneficial to individuals to have access to this information. It also allows for two-way communication as mentioned earlier but this-- Kris Ray, for example, and his community has provided us a lot of feedback in our pilot years that we really try to take-- we can't always address all the shortcomings but every year we really try to strategize on what we can address for the next year and chip away year by year. And then finally citizen science is really an ultimate example of science that fosters change in the communities and embeds that supports that data and knowledge sharing. There's [CLEARING THROAT] through these last three or four years we've also developed quite a bit of side projects that are related to Smoke Sense in that have taken out-- taken new interesting directions and I'm just going to leave it here at that and let Mary Clare then talk about Smoke Ready Communities.

Mary Clare Hano: Hi everybody, my name is Mary Clare Hano and I work with Ana on  the Smoke Sense project and I'm going to just share a little bit about the Smoke Ready Community research that we have [INAUDIBLE] underway and try to link this back to some of the Smoke Ready work that Kris shared at the beginning of the webinar. I'm going to turn off [UNINTELLIGIBLE] my camera just for bandwidth and then we'll go from there. So Smoke Ready Communities from a research project, is really designed to better understand how a collaborative locally led approach to planning for future wildland fire smoke events can help communities improve their response to smoke events as well as their readiness for future events. And so Smoke Ready Communities as a term, you may hear things like smoke-ready, smoke-ready communities, all multiple variations but it really is a term that reflects this very broad approach across multiple agencies and organizations that are all aimed at doing exactly what Kris suggested which is getting better prepared for future smoke events and being able to respond in a way that makes sense and is appropriate based on the community needs and priorities and resources. And so from a research perspective, we are we're really looking to try to understand what this collaborative approach means in terms of those desired locally like defined responses and how taking a collaborative approach may influence resilience for future events, meaning resilience, meaning the ability for a community to bounce back after a smoke event but also to learn from their experiences during past events and be able to improve their response going forward. And so we are-- we pulled together a range of resources that we think would be useful for local smoke planning teams to use and scoping and developing their-- a tailored local response plan. And so this research is really geared towards local state and tribal organizations that focus on wildland fire and public health and environmental quality as well as air quality. And so when a few years ago before we got involved, some of our colleagues in the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Office of Air and Radiation with EPA as well as external partners,  started to really try to define and scope what does it mean when for a community to become smoke ready and through a number of interviews and interactions they-- this [UNINTELLIGIBLE] list of six community characteristics emerged and they are communities that are ready to -- for smoke events and that can effectively respond in the way that they just define, have gone through and identified their vulnerable populations or subgroups within their overall community that may be at increased risk for adverse health effects related to exposure to smoke. There are-- they have information delivery channels methods already planned and set up, so they know who t’ey're going to get-- who they want to get the information to including the overall community population as well as specific subgroups within that community and they know how they’re going to get that information out. And the third characteristic is they have this communication and educational materials prepared and ready to go such that when they’re needed, they can be distributed through those communication channels to the different groups. They also identified a couple of more technical aspects of smoke readiness and I know during current circumstances public gatherings and clean air spaces within communities are challenging, but I think into the future it's -- it will come back around and so communities that are ready for smoke events have kind of planned through and thought about and made plans for cleaner air spaces that community members could come to. And this is especially important in places like where like what Kris mentioned where there's not a need sometimes for  each home to have an air conditioning system just based on climate [UNINTELLIGIBLE] those kinds of communities it can be really important to have places where folks can go to get-- to escape from smoke exposure. They also identified air quality monitors and temporary sensors, so this characteristic was all about communities that have planned ahead for how they want to supplement and fill in the existing air quality monitoring network that's within their communities with temporary monitors that can be put up and during, it can be set up and then taken down, depending on the smoke circumstances. So they've got communities that are ready for future events have already gone through that process of understanding what their needs are related to that, and what they want to do in terms of like purchasing air quality monitors figuring out, who's going to maintain them and calibrate and set them up all of that kind of thing. And then the last part was-- they said that these communities are doing all of these things, but they also have decision points for action so that they aren't making those decisions in kind of the heat of the moment if you will. You trying to decide like okay now do we need, what do we need to do when that's already been gone through and planned for, so now they're just implementing these plans based on different criteria or trigger points that may emerge during a smoke event. And so, one of-- what we see here and what we've heard and learned from other projects is that communication like both Ana and Kris were saying a public health response to wildland fire smoke episodes is largely a communication response and that's [UNINTELLIGIBLE] kind of reflected in the first-- the half of the community characteristics that were identified. And it's largely a communication response, because what we need people to do is to take action that related to their personal exposure to wildfire smoke and not necessarily try to take it-- take action or getting get involved in any kind of response or management. And so we focused and the public health communication part is essential to the Smoke Ready Communities research that we are starting and have underway. And so, after our colleagues identified these six characteristics. One of the things that we're exploring from a research perspective is the role or relationship that a collaborative approach to planning for future smoke events. The relationship between taking this collaborative approach and increased or improved readiness and response to smoke as well as increased resilience  And so, when I say a collaborative approach to response we have another set of steps that we've outlined but it's really about pulling with -- at the local level pulling together individuals from different organizations and different groups and sectors within the community and bringing folks to the table to understand what the issue looks like and how it's experienced by different sectors of the population, different subgroups within the population. And then trying to really develop that comprehensive picture of the type of impacts that community members are experiencing. And then leverage that in terms of that understanding and developing a community-specific response plan for that addresses and tries to mitigate some of those adverse impacts. And so, kind of pulling these people together and developing a plan, and then putting that plan into action when following the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] integrating the decision point so putting that plan into action when it's decided upon, and then monitoring how it goes and then celebrating all of the work that went into it and then really thinking reflecting and revising on what went well, and what didn't go well and we have to repeat which we see on a lot of these kinds of models and frameworks and really to underscore that as dynamic of a situation that smoke is, it really bears the effort for-- it really requires that iterative annual look at the plan to see okay, this is what we did last year, and this is how it went and now let's think through how can we do better. So really pulling in that learning and an improved future response aspect. And so, what are we actually doing, so where we are right now, we are working with three communities in the western part of the United States and with each community we are-- our research team is working with individual leaders within those communities that have expressed  and we're working with them to develop a local smoke team that is a smoke planning team that's made up of folks from a range of sectors within the community, and then we'll go through this process with them of education, so getting folks within that team on the same page and using some of the same language or maybe not using the same language but at least understanding what each other means when we use different terms. And then going through that education part, but then the second half of the process is working with the team to develop okay, so now that we know what the risk is and what the risk is to us and what our typical response is, let's develop a plan for what we want to happen and kind of scope out our plan across those different care community characteristics that the our counterparts identified a few years ago, so including in the plan, going through the process of identifying those vulnerable populations and vulnerable subgroups and listing those within the plan of these are-- we want to get with the whole group and the whole community of course, but there's subgroups in here that may be at increased risk and these are what the subgroups are and how we're going to get how we're going to connect with them. So really working with that group to get on the same page in terms of awareness and then also developing a plan for what they would like to do in terms of their response. And from a research perspective what we're doing and the kinds of data that we're collecting is we're assessing both where those smoke team members are in terms of different individual level capacity for engaging in the planning process, we're also getting their insights on broader dimensions of community capacity for responding to smoke. And we'll be collecting those data from folks at multiple points throughout the process, and we're also observing these public team meetings to really understand what does it look like when they a collaborative process is used in this context and what goes well, what kinds of challenges come up. And what we hope to do with the information is then to be able to share that with our colleagues and more broadly to share, and kind of share the story of these [UNINTELLIGIBLE]-- this is one approach that you can use at the community level to improve your future response, and here's how it worked in three actual communities, and this is what went well and here's where they would do it differently next time. And really trying to inform some of those recommendations that we want to be able to make for folks for improving smoke readiness. And so [UNINTELLIGIBLE] we're going through fall of 2022, we're currently underway right now, and we'll go through fall of 2022 and before I wrapped up, I really just wanted to recognize Kris and Kris Ray and his colleagues for his leadership and vision and that his book benefited his community, but some of this broader research efforts, that their work has much broader reach than just within the Colville Reservation and we've been able to use their insights and experiences to both improve future iterations of Smoke Sense, but as well as well as the Smoke Ready Communities research effort. So, I'll hand it back to Mary Clare Hano: Hi everybody, my name is Mary Clare Hano and I work with Ana on  the Smoke Sense project and I'm going to just share a little bit about the Smoke Ready Community research that we have [INAUDIBLE] underway and try to link this back to some of the Smoke Ready work that Kris shared at the beginning of the webinar. I'm going to turn off my camera just for bandwidth and then we'll go from there. So Smoke Ready Communities from a research project, is really designed to better understand how a collaborative locally led approach to planning for future wildland fire smoke events can help communities improve their response to smoke events as well as their readiness for future events. And so Smoke Ready Communities as a term, you may hear things like smoke-ready, smoke-ready communities, all multiple variations but it really is a term that reflects this very broad approach across multiple agencies and organizations that are all aimed at doing exactly what Kris suggested which is getting better prepared for future smoke events and being able to respond in a way that makes sense and is appropriate based on the community needs and priorities and resources. And so from a research perspective, we are we're really looking to try to understand what this collaborative approach means in terms of those desired locally like defined responses and how taking a collaborative approach may influence resilience for future events, meaning resilience, meaning the ability for a community to bounce back after a smoke event but also to learn from their experiences during past events and be able to improve their response going forward. And so we are-- we pulled together a range of resources that we think would be useful for local smoke planning teams to use and scoping and developing their-- a tailored local response plan. And so this research is really geared towards local state and tribal organizations that focus on wildland fire and public health and environmental quality as well as air quality. And so when a few years ago before we got involved, some of our colleagues in the Office of Air and Radiation with EPA as well as external partners,  started to really try to define and scope what does it mean when for a community to become smoke ready and through a number of interviews and interactions they-- this list of six community characteristics emerged and they are communities that are ready to -- for smoke events and that can effectively respond in the way that they just define, have gone through and identified their vulnerable populations or subgroups within their overall community that may be at increased risk for adverse health effects related to exposure to smoke. There are-- they have information delivery channels methods already planned and set up, so they know who t’ey're going to get-- who they want to get the information to including the overall community population as well as specific subgroups within that community and they know how they’re going to get that information out. And the third characteristic is they have this communication and educational materials prepared and ready to go such that when they’re needed, they can be distributed through those communication channels to the different groups. They also identified a couple of more technical aspects of smoke readiness and I know during current circumstances public gatherings and clean air spaces within communities are challenging, but I think into the future it's -- it will come back around and so communities that are ready for smoke events have kind of planned through and thought about and made plans for cleaner air spaces that community members could come to. And this is especially important in places like where like what Kris mentioned where there's not a need sometimes for each home to have an air conditioning system just based on climate -- those kinds of communities it can be really important to have places where folks can go to get-- to escape from smoke exposure. They also identified air quality monitors and temporary sensors, so this characteristic was all about communities that have planned ahead for how they want to supplement and fill in the existing air quality monitoring network that's within their communities with temporary monitors that can be put up and during, it can be set up and then taken down, depending on the smoke circumstances. So they've got communities that are ready for future events have already gone through that process of understanding what their needs are related to that, and what they want to do in terms of like purchasing air quality monitors figuring out, who's going to maintain them and calibrate and set them up all of that kind of thing. And then the last part was-- they said that these communities are doing all of these things, but they also have decision points for action so that they aren't making those decisions in kind of the heat of the moment if you will. You trying to decide like okay now do we need, what do we need to do when that's already been gone through and planned for, so now they're just implementing these plans based on different criteria or trigger points that may emerge during a smoke event. And so, one of-- what we see here and what we've heard and learned from other projects is that communication like both Ana and Kris were saying a public health response to wildland fire smoke episodes is largely a communication response and that's kind of reflected in the first-- the half of the community characteristics that were identified. And it's largely a communication response, because what we need people to do is to take action that related to their personal exposure to wildfire smoke and not necessarily try to take it-- take action or getting get involved in any kind of response or management. And so we focused and the public health communication part is essential to the Smoke Ready Communities research that we are starting and have underway. And so, after our colleagues identified these six characteristics. One of the things that we're exploring from a research perspective is the role or relationship that a collaborative approach to planning for future smoke events. The relationship between taking this collaborative approach and increased or improved readiness and response to smoke as well as increased resilience for future smoke event. And so, when I say a collaborative approach to response we have another set of steps that we've outlined but it's really about pulling with -- at the local level pulling together individuals from different organizations and different groups and sectors within the community and bringing folks to the table to understand what the issue looks like and how it's experienced by different sectors of the population, different subgroups within the population. And then trying to really develop that comprehensive picture of the type of impacts that community members are experiencing. And then leverage that in terms of that understanding and developing a community-specific response plan for that addresses and tries to mitigate some of those adverse impacts. And so, kind of pulling these people together and developing a plan, and then putting that plan into action when following the -- integrating the decision point so putting that plan into action when it's decided upon, and then monitoring how it goes and then celebrating all of the work that went into it and then really thinking reflecting and revising on what went well, and what didn't go well and we have to repeat which we see on a lot of these kinds of models and frameworks and really to underscore that as dynamic of a situation that smoke is, it really bears the effort for-- it really requires that iterative annual look at the plan to see okay, this is what we did last year, and this is how it went and now let's think through how can we do better. So really pulling in that learning and an improved future response aspect. And so, what are we actually doing, so where we are right now, we are working with three communities in the western part of the United States and with each community we are-- our research team is working with individual leaders within those communities that have expressed an interest in working with us on the project, and we're working with them to develop a local smoke team that is a smoke planning team that's made up of folks from a range of sectors within the community, and then we'll go through this process with them of education, so getting folks within that team on the same page and using some of the same language or maybe not using the same language but at least understanding what each other means when we use different terms. And then going through that education part, but then the second half of the process is working with the team to develop okay, so now that we know what the risk is and what the risk is to us and what our typical response is, let's develop a plan for what we want to happen and kind of scope out our plan across those different care community characteristics that the our counterparts identified a few years ago, so including in the plan, going through the process of identifying those vulnerable populations and vulnerable subgroups and listing those within the plan of these are-- we want to get with the whole group and the whole community of course, but there's subgroups in here that may be at increased risk and these are what the subgroups are and how we're going to get how we're going to connect with them. So really working with that group to get on the same page in terms of awareness and then also developing a plan for what they would like to do in terms of their response. And from a research perspective what we're doing and the kinds of data that we're collecting is we're assessing both where those smoke team members are in terms of different individual level capacity for engaging in the planning process, we're also getting their insights on broader dimensions of community capacity for responding to smoke. And we'll be collecting those data from folks at multiple points throughout the process, and we're also observing these public team meetings to really understand what does it look like when they a collaborative process is used in this context and what goes well, what kinds of challenges come up. And what we hope to do with the information is then to be able to share that with our colleagues and more broadly to share, and kind of share the story of these -- this is one approach that you can use at the community level to improve your future response, and here's how it worked in three actual communities, and this is what went well and here's where they would do it differently next time. And really trying to inform some of those recommendations that we want to be able to make for folks for improving smoke readiness. And so we're going through fall of 2022, we're currently underway right now, and we'll go through fall of 2022 and before I wrapped up, I really just wanted to recognize Kris and Kris Ray and his colleagues for his leadership and vision and that his book benefited his community, but some of this broader research efforts, that their work has much broader reach than just within the Colville Reservation and we've been able to use their insights and experiences to both improve future iterations of Smoke Sense, but as well as well as the Smoke Ready Communities research effort. So, I'll hand it back to you Danny, thank you.

Danny Gogal: Great, thank you, Clare. And so we're now going to enter into the questions and answer period, as well as talk with you a little bit about our evaluation that we put together for this webinar. So I have two of my colleagues from EPA that will be assisting with these both of these we have Danielle Ridley, who's with ORD, who's a colleague of Mary Clare's and Ana's who will coordinating our question-and-answer period. And then I have my colleague from the Office of Environmental Justice Ericka Farrell, who will share with you a little bit about the evaluation before we go into the questions. So if maybe Danielle you would excuse me, Danielle you don't just mind waiting for just a minute let Ericka just mention about the evaluation so folks could perhaps Danny Gogal: Great, thank you, Clare. And so we're now going to enter into the questions and answer period, as well as talk with you a little bit about our evaluation that we put together for this webinar. So I have two of my colleagues from EPA that will be assisting with these both of these we have Danielle Ridley, who's with ORD, who's a colleague of Mary Clare's and Ana's who will coordinating our question-and-answer period. And then I have my colleague from the Office of Environmental Justice Ericka Farrell, who will share with you a little bit about the evaluation before we go into the questions. So if maybe Danielle you would excuse me, Danielle you don't just mind waiting for just a minute let Ericka just mention about the evaluation so folks could perhaps be working on that while we do the Q&A.

Ericka Farrell: Good afternoon everyone, again thank you for attending this webinar, and I've posted in the chat the link to the evaluation form and we will certainly appreciate you completing it so let us know how we can improve, and whether you've received any valuable information from this webinar which is a part II on Wildfires and Air Quality Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities. Ericka Farrell: Good afternoon everyone, again thank you for attending this webinar, and I've posted in the chat the link to the evaluation form and we will certainly appreciate you completing it so let us know how we can improve, and whether you've received any valuable information from this webinar which is a part II on Wildfires and Air Quality Smoke Sense and Smoke Ready Communities. Thank you.

Danny Gogal: Great thanks, Ericka. We're also going to be emailing you this evaluation form as well, but like everything in life if you do it an evaluation right after the event that you participated in, that's when you have the greatest likelihood of being able to find some good insight so if you could do that for us we'd appreciate it, you just click on the link, fill it out, hit submit and it's a quick  Okay, Danielle, I'm going to turn it over to you to run our question-and-answer period.Danny Gogal: Great thanks, Ericka. We're also going to be emailing you this evaluation form as well, but like everything in life if you do it an evaluation right after the event that you participated in, that's when you have the greatest likelihood of being able to find some good insight so if you could do that for us we'd appreciate it, you just click on the link, fill it out, hit submit and it's a quick set of questions that are easy to answer. Okay, Danielle, I'm going to turn it over to you to run our question-and-answer period.

Danielle Ridley: All right, hello everyone, my name is Danielle Ridley, as Danny mentioned, and I'm from EPA's Office of Research and Development, and so we've reached our question and answer segment. So, we'll address questions as noted in the chat, and will allow you to unmute yourself, so please, type your question in the chat box or use the raise your hand feature at the top of your screen, so that we can make sure we get your question. So currently I see The first one, it seems to be the case that wildfire season is accelerating each and every year, lasting longer and coming sooner than later, damaging planet earth and causing millions of people harm, especially, the west coast of the USA. What steps are we taking to mitigate and prevent these wildfires? And I believe this question came during honest segment, but if any of the researchers and Kris, if you have any feedback, please Danielle Ridley: All right, hello everyone, my name is Danielle Ridley, as Danny mentioned, and I'm from EPA's Office of Research and Development, and so we've reached our question and answer segment. So, we'll address questions as noted in the chat, and will allow you to unmute yourself, so please, type your question in the chat box or use the raise your hand feature at the top of your screen, so that we can make sure we get your question. So currently I see The first one, it seems to be the case that wildfire season is accelerating each and every year, lasting longer and coming sooner than later, damaging planet earth and causing millions of people harm, especially, the west coast of the USA. What steps are we taking to mitigate and prevent these wildfires? And I believe this question came during honest segment, but if any of the researchers and Kris, if you have any feedback, please feel free to chime in on this question.

Ana Rappold: Well, I can-- it's a very good question, our focus-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] At EPA we have [UNINTELLIGIBLE] -- Mary Clare and I work inside of the Office of Research and Development, but the question is related to the management of smoke and fires which would be a question for the programmatic office such as like Office of Air and Radiation that deal with that. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] But just generally from being a part of this community, addressing wildfire smoke as a health risk, my observation is that this has been really an example where across all federal agencies, people have been working together to come up with new and better frameworks to manage the risk of fires, right? But largely it depends on the states themselves and a lot of it federal lands, of course, our purview of Department of Agriculture. I don't know if that helps, but I mean I just want to say that it is a very big question and many states have increased the level of prescribed burning and the level of mechanical clearing of the lands or proposing different use of the lands in order to reduce Ana Rappold: Well, I can-- it's a very good question, our focus-- At EPA we have -- Mary Clare and I work inside of the Office of Research and Development, but the question is related to the management of smoke and fires which would be a question for the programmatic office such as like Office of Air and Radiation that deal with that. But just generally from being a part of this community, addressing wildfire smoke as a health risk, my observation is that this has been really an example where across all federal agencies, people have been working together to come up with new and better frameworks to manage the risk of fires, right? But largely it depends on the states themselves and a lot of it federal lands, of course, our purview of Department of Agriculture. I don't know if that helps, but I mean I just want to say that it is a very big question and many states have increased the level of prescribed burning and the level of mechanical clearing of the lands or proposing different use of the lands in order to reduce the risk of fires themselves.

Danielle Ridley: Thank you, Ana. Mary Clare, did you have Danielle Ridley: Thank you, Ana. Mary Clare, did you have something to add?

Mary Clare Hano: I was just going to add the regional EPA offices might also have some resources to be able-- that can-- to be able to share with folks that so that we're[UNINTELLIGIBLE] that are specific to their particular context. And so there's so many different factors that go into it that the regional EPA Office is likely someone who can point them in the right direction and maybe give not more informed, but more accurate response and we'd be happy to Mary Clare Hano: I was just going to add the regional EPA offices might also have some resources to be able-- that can-- to be able to share with folks that so that we're -- that are specific to their particular context. And so there's so many different factors that go into it that the regional EPA Office is likely someone who can point them in the right direction and maybe give not more informed, but more accurate response and we'd be happy to connect folks if that's helpful.

Danielle Ridley: Great, thank you, the next question in the queue is does Smoke Sense have plans to incorporate the pilot smoke and fire map with additional calibrated Danielle Ridley: Great, thank you, the next question in the queue is does Smoke Sense have plans to incorporate the pilot smoke and fire map with additional calibrated personal air monitors?

Ana Rappold: Yeah, that is very high on our list of things to do things too, we actually hope that we would be able to do that by this fire season. explore quite a bit on how to go about doing it given our constraints, Ana Rappold: Yeah, that is very high on our list of things to do things too, we actually hope that we would be able to do that by this fire season. explore quite a bit on how to go about doing it given our constraints, but I think it's doable.

Danielle Ridley: Okay, thank you!

Ana Rappold: And then it's a citizen science project, so we are there-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE] the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] fire website already includes for example PurpleAir, where we would like to develop a concept where any personal sensor could be included on the map, so for that we need to develop a little bit of an infrastructure and how the sensors communicate with the app, and with our servers to in order to render that information back to all the users. And then how do you show the array of air quality information from different sensors, so it's kind of--we're thinking about it. One specific task Ana Rappold: And then it's a citizen science project, so we are there-- the fire website already includes for example PurpleAir, where we would like to develop a concept where any personal sensor could be included on the map, so for that we need to develop a little bit of an infrastructure and how the sensors communicate with the app, and with our servers to in order to render that information back to all the users. And then how do you show the array of air quality information from different sensors, so it's kind of--we're thinking about it. One specific task versus a larger domain.

Danielle Ridley: Great, thank you, Ana, we have a another question, how about USFS temporary Danielle Ridley: Great, thank you, Ana, we have a another question, how about USFS temporary monitors deployed for smoke?

Ana Rappold: Those are-- they're included on the map they're different, they're given as [UNINTELLIGIBLE] a different symbol on the map, but I believe that is US Forest Service and maybe some of our regional resources EPA, as resources but they worked out, so that the data is reported live and then we can just draw that data from their database Ana Rappold: Those are-- they're included on the map they're different, they're given as a different symbol on the map, but I believe that is US Forest Service and maybe some of our regional resources EPA, as resources but they worked out, so that the data is reported live and then we can just draw that data from their database so it is included in the App.

Danielle Ridley: Okay, thank you. And so, it looks like we're going to make sure we get that link for NTAA for those who are interested in contacting the organization as Pat Childers mentioned and as very clear also reiterated that tribes can work with EPA regions in the NTAA. So, the National Tribal Air Association to address these programmatic concerns and learn best practices from them. So please we have about another 10 minutes if you have additional questions feel free to put them in the chat and/or raise your hand, Danielle Ridley: Okay, thank you. And so, it looks like we're going to make sure we get that link for NTAA for those who are interested in contacting the organization as Pat Childers mentioned and as very clear also reiterated that tribes can work with EPA regions in the NTAA. So, the National Tribal Air Association to address these programmatic concerns and learn best practices from them. So please we have about another 10 minutes if you have additional questions feel free to put them in the chat and/or raise your hand, and we'll be sure to get your question.

Danny Gogal: Okay, Danielle. It doesn't appear that there's any other questions in the chat room and I don't see anyone raising their hands. So we will go ahead and close out the webinar, we want to share with you our contact information. I recognized that I failed to introduce myself at the beginning [LAUGHS] I suppose the saying goes better late than never. So, I'm Danny Gogal with EPA's Office Environmental Justice. We greatly appreciate you all participating in today's webinar. I know that I mentioned that they've been several already [CLEARING THROAT] But I didn't mention that our hope is to have more or less one a month [CLEARING THROAT] and this month was special we had two, that's not our normal. So, look out for our notices, we publish the information about the webinars on our EJ listserv. If you do not-- if you're not registered on the EJ listserv, we encourage you to do that, you can just Google EJ listserv and you can find that and basically it just requires you to send an email to the link that's provided or the email address that's provided and that gets you on the list. We want to thank Kris from Colville Reservation and Ana and Mary Clare, both from the Office of Research and Development, and of course my colleague. As I mentioned Danielle coordinating our Q&A session, as well as Ericka, who's been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination with me on these webinars. [CLEARING THROAT] And all the many of the logistics with the teams. We are going to-- as you all know, we've recorded this session, and it is our intention to actually post this on our web page. It does take us a few weeks to do that, and once we do I will do my best to remember to actually email the link directly to you in the event that I failed to do that, you can go to our webpage that was posted in the notice for this webinar, and be able to see the recordings that exist. So, thank you again for participating, we do ask you to please provide us feedback. We will send out an email shortly if not today, tomorrow with the Powerpoint presentations that were used today for this webinar as well as the evaluation for. So, enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to have you participate in our future webinars, Danny Gogal: Okay, Danielle. It doesn't appear that there's any other questions in the chat room and I don't see anyone raising their hands. So we will go ahead and close out the webinar, we want to share with you our contact information. I recognized that I failed to introduce myself at the beginning [LAUGHS] I suppose the saying goes better late than never. So, I'm Danny Gogal with EPA's Office Environmental Justice. We greatly appreciate you all participating in today's webinar. I know that I mentioned that they've been several already [CLEARING THROAT] But I didn't mention that our hope is to have more or less one a month [CLEARING THROAT] and this month was special we had two, that's not our normal. So, look out for our notices, we publish the information about the webinars on our EJ listserv. If you do not-- if you're not registered on the EJ listserv, we encourage you to do that, you can just Google EJ listserv and you can find that and basically it just requires you to send an email to the link that's provided or the email address that's provided and that gets you on the list. We want to thank Kris from Colville Reservation and Ana and Mary Clare, both from the Office of Research and Development, and of course my colleague. As I mentioned Danielle coordinating our Q&A session, as well as Ericka, who's been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination with me on these webinars. [CLEARING THROAT] And all the many of the logistics with the teams. We are going to-- as you all know, we've recorded this session, and it is our intention to actually post this on our web page. It does take us a few weeks to do that, and once we do I will do my best to remember to actually email the link directly to you in the event that I failed to do that, you can go to our webpage that was posted in the notice for this webinar, and be able to see the recordings that exist. So, thank you again for participating, we do ask you to please provide us feedback. We will send out an email shortly if not today, tomorrow with the Powerpoint presentations that were used today for this webinar as well as the evaluation for. So, enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to have you participate in our future webinars, take care.