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Frequent, low-severity fires were the norm in many dry forests
across the western United States, prior to Euro-America settlement.
These fires kept accumulated fuels such as fallen branches and
dead trees to a minimum. They cleared out many younger, smaller
trees while older trees in these fire-adapted ecosystems developed
thick bark that protected them from the heat of periodic fires.
A century of ardent fire suppression and declines in timber harvests
on federal land over the past 20 years have left many western
forests over-stocked with small trees competing for water. Add
drought
to the mix and the trees become even more vulnerable to insect
outbreak. Forests of stressed trees surrounded by heavy fuel
loads are vulnerable to wildfires that are hotter and larger than
would
have burned historically. The philosophy behind forest management
in the United States has evolved over time. Sixty years ago,
federal forests were primarily
seen a source of timber. Today they are managed to provide a
range of benefits to society, including recreation, timber, water,
and
wildlife habitat. It’s recognized that fire plays a critical
role in nature, serving as an agent of change and renewal. Given
current conditions in many federal forests across the West, however,
it’s generally thought that some treatment is needed to
help restore beneficial fire to the ecosystem. Without intervention,
current fuel loads leave many areas at increased risk of catastrophic
fire.
Scientists with the Pacific Northwest Research Station
work with
land managers to develop effective fuel-reduction treatments.
These treatments usually include thinning, prescribed burns,
or combinations
of the two. Station scientists also develop models to help
fuel managers and other decisionmakers strategically place fuel
treatments
to help achieve various goals, such as preserving large trees,
improving certain wildlife habitat, and protecting homes in
the wildland-urban interface.
Research Examples:
Thinning followed by prescribed burn.
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Tools
Ecosystem Management Decision Support system
EMDS version
4.0 provides
integrated, spatially enabled, multiscale decision support for
environmental analysis and planning. It has been used to develop
national level decision-support applications for fuel analysis
and fuel-treatment planning for the Forest Service and U.S. Department
of the Interior.
The basic objectives of any EMDS application
are to (1) develop an improved understanding of the state of
the environment at
whatever spatial scales are relevant to an application area,
and (2) assist
with design of strategic solutions for environmental protection
and restoration.
EMDS 4.0 continues to maintain compatibility
with the latest releases of the world’s leading geographic
information system technology, ArcGIS. Numerous major system enhancements
were introduced in version
4.0 to improve the robustness and usability of the system and
ensure its continued viability for the foreseeable future.
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Fuel Treatment Planner (MyFTP)
MyFTP is
designed to allow planners working at the level of a national forest
district or similarly
sized unit to estimate costs, revenues, economic impacts, and
surface fuels resulting from operations designed to reduce fuel
loads in fire-prone forests. The software is limited in scope
to the dry forests of the western United States. MyFTP is a spreadsheet
application developed with Microsoft® Excel® 2002. Its
compatibility with spreadsheet software other than Microsoft
Excel has not been tested. MyFTP has, however, been tested successfully
with Excel 2002-2003 and with Excel 2007.
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Fuel Reduction Cost Simulator variants
The Excel-based Fuel
Reduction Cost Simulator (FRCS) model estimates the cost
of harvesting and collecting biomass from small trees
and from forest residues associated with commercial logging operations.
The model has variants for the western, southern, and northern
regions of the United States.
These new variants of FRCS have
been used to develop forest biomass supply curves for all forested
counties in the continental United
States. The original version was published in 2004 and was limited
to forests of the interior West. A request to use the model for
a nationwide assessment of the economic supply of biomass available
from farm and forest residues and biomass plantations to support
bioenergy and biofuels led to this extension of the capabilities
of FRCS so
that all regions of the United States could be evaluated. An
independent cost module also was developed that lets users easily
update costs of diesel fuel, equipment, and labor in any part
of
the country. Production equations from numerous studies on biomass
harvesting operations in different regions of the country were
incorporated so that users can select the most relevant equations
for their needs.
------------------------------------------------------------- Harvest
Cost-Revenue (HCR) Estimator
Harvest
Cost-Revenue (HCR) Estimator is
a Windows-based financial and engineering software application
that calculates the cost of wildfire fuel-reduction
treatments
on a project-by-project basis. It may be used to evaluate cost-per-acre
thresholds for logging contractors, appraise contract bid rates,
or assess stumpage values for ponderosa pine stands in the Southwest
United States. It illustrates variability in fuel reduction costs
as related to the level of fuels reduction achieved, volume of
merchantable wood removed from different forest stands, and availability
of markets for removed material.
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