Pacific Southwest Region

Tree covered forest land provides many values including: wildlife habitat, stable watersheds, cleaner air, and wood fiber for energy generation and building materials. This site offers an assessment of tree loss due to wildfires and indirectly the resultant broad scale losses for all the benefits that forested lands offer. The intent is to increase awareness of the levels of deforested conditions occurring on National forests in California (see map), improve communication among concerned citizens, and begin to identify reforestation needs as part of the broader ecosystem restoration objective. This effort focuses on the wildfires that occurred during the period 2000-2011 on national forests in California.

The 18 national forests in the Pacific Southwest Region of the Forest Service (Region 5) experience well over 1,000 wildfires every year, most of which are relatively small. The largest 10 to 20 fires typically account for 90% of the total acreage burned. Therefore, the work displayed on this site concentrates on fires that burned more than 1,000 acres of National Forest forestland (land that grows trees).

The assessment on this web site utilizes estimates developed immediately post-fire. The imagery used to make these estimates may be acquired late in the year when sun angles are low due to fire containment dates. Fire effects on north facing slopes can be hidden due to topographic shadows caused by low sun angles. Therefore, high severity fire effects in these data may be under-represented. Low to moderate severity in dense stands on east, west, or south aspects may also be under-represented due to a low sun illumination angle. This assessment includes fire incidents that burn more than 1,000 acres of forestland on national forests. These same fire incidents will be remapped one-year post-fire by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program (www.mtbs.gov).

Pie chart displaying post fire condition for 108 selected large fires: 2000-2010, 3,450,000 total acres. Forested Condition (survived the fire): 1,060,000 acres or 31 percent. Deforested Condition (did not survive the fire): 520,000 acres or 15 percent. Not Forestland (shrubland, grassland, etc.): 1,051,000 acres or 30 percent. Not National Forest (other ownership): 820,000 acres or 24 percent.

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USDA Forest Service - Pacific Southwest Region
Last Modified: Friday, 02 December 2011 at 13:43:49 EST