You are at WWETAC >>>

Wildfire Risk and Fuel Treatment

Wildland fire and related natural disturbances continue to grow as a major global threat to property, lives, and ecosystem integrity. There is growing scientific evidence that climate change is in part responsible for catastrophic fire events that are increasingly common. Wildfires increase the likelihood of a wide range of adverse impacts on wildlands, including flooding, erosion, loss of key wildlife habitat and other other ecological and economic values.

Wildland fire interacts with many other disturbance agents at multiple scales over space and time. For example, bark beetle and wildfire form a particularly intricate disturbance complex. Climate change, fire suppression, and other management practices over the past 100 years have altered succession and disturbance regimes, and created forest conditions that are prone to both bark beetle outbreaks and severe wildfire. From a management perspective, a clear understanding of the bark beetle–fire relationship is needed to formulate strategies to dampen the disturbance process. As federal land management agencies accelerate treatment of hazardous fuels over wide areas in the Western United States, practices such as mechanical thinning, surface fuel reduction, the reintroduction of prescribed fire, and natural fire will likely change bark beetle dynamics and bark beetle-caused tree mortality. Prescribed fire and thinning prescriptions in the dry forest types favor retention of tree species such as ponderosa pine that are hosts for a suite of bark beetles. This particular threat complex is one of many wildland fire disturbance interactions of concern to land managers.

Current WWETAC Fire Projects include:

• Did thinning and surface fuel treatments save homes from the 2011 Wallow Fire (Arizona)?
• Examining costs and benefits of fuel treatments for forest planning in the Sky Islands of Arizona
• Integrated weather/fire/economics modeling framework for fire risk assessment system
• A multi-scale approach for remotely mapping pine-beetle attacks over time and associated fire hazard
• Operational program for updating wildland fuel data for non-forested landscapes
• Using lidar to improve the reliability of GNN vegetation and fuels maps for forest management and risk assessment

Previous WWETAC Fire Projects include:

• Application of wildfire risk analysis to examine carbon flux from fuel treatments
• ArcFuels: An ArcGIS interface for fuel treatment planning and wildfire risk assessment
• Case studies on risk analysis for fuel treatment planning
• Crown fire behavior characteristics and prediction in conifer forests: A state of knowledge synthesis
• Developing a web-based forest management and fire carbon calculator
• Evaluating interactions between insect infestations and fire extent and fire severity: A preliminary investigation in Washington and Oregon
• Evaluating soil risks associated with severe wildfire and ground-based logging
• Evaluation of models used to predict postfire tree mortality
• Examining the influence and effectiveness of communication programs and community partnerships on public perceptions of smoke management: A multi-region analysis
• Fire, bark beetles and salvage logging in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
• ICWater sediment transport module
• Influence of bark beetles and black stain root disease on delayed mortality predictions of prescribed fire-damaged ponderosa pine in the eastern Cascades
• Integrating ecological risk assessment and economics in environmental decision-making: Fire management case study
• Interaction of private and public forest fire risk management decisions
• Landscape-level effects of fuel treatments on wildfire risk and carbon in central Oregon
• Modeling wildfire risk to spotted owl habitat in central Oregon, USA
• A national early warning system for environmental threats
• Prescribed fire regime and grazing effects on understory vegetation and exotic invasive plants
• Probabilistic risk models for multiple disturbances: an example of forest insects and wildfires
• Risk science plan for the Joint Fire Science Program
• Sudden oak death and fire
• Synthesis of effects of insect-caused tree mortality on fire characteristics
• Wildfire links to climate change: Linking FlamMap wildfire simulation model to the Envision planning model
• Wildfire risk analysis at the National Forest scale
• Wildfire risk assessment framework for strategic planning
• Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment GeoService
• Wildland Fire Leadership Council - Wildfire Risk and Hazard
• The Wildland Fire Leadership Council's wildfire risk monitoring project