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Author(s):
Carol Miller, Kevin C. Vogler, Joe H. Scott, Matthew P. Thompson
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fuels
Fuel Treatments & Effects

NRFSN number: 24561
Record updated:

Actively treating fuels with prescribed fire or non-fire techniques is infeasible for a substantial portion of federal lands, and there is a need for increased use of wildland fires from unplanned ignitions to help manage fuels. The challenge is how to integrate active fuel management with the opportunistic use of wildland fire into an effective landscape-scale fuel treatment strategy that keeps people, property, and infrastructure safe and ecosystems healthy. This project aimed to improve our understanding of how fuels management can be designed at landscape scales to enhance both protection and resource management objectives.

Advances in fire modeling help quantify and map various components and characterizations of wildfire risk, and furthermore help evaluate the ability of fuel treatments to mitigate risk. However, a need remains for guidance in designing landscape-scale fuel treatments with protection objectives, resource management objectives, and wildfire response in mind. We build on these themes to illustrate an approach for examining whether, and how, fuels management can simultaneously minimize housing exposure while maximizing areas suitable for expansion of beneficial wildfire. We compare multiple hypothetical post-treatment conditions generated according to distinct treatment prioritization schemes (Housing Protection, Federal Risk Transmission, Random) and variable treatment extents, and illustrate how strategies compare. We used stochastic wildfire simulation and computations of exposure to wildfire to compare strategy performance across two very large (~2Mha) landscapes – the southern Sierra in California and northern New Mexico.

In general, we found that treating near housing units can provide the greatest level of protection relative to treating more remote wildlands to reduce transmission potential. Treating on federal lands to reduce federal transmission was highly effective at reducing exposure from federal fires and at expanding opportunities for beneficial fire but contributed comparatively little to reducing housing exposure from all fires. We find that treatment extents as low as 2.5-5% can yield significant benefits with spatially optimized strategies, whereas the random strategy didn’t perform comparably until reaching 25% treatment extent. These general patterns held across two landscapes with very different patterns of ownership, housing density, fire potential, and optimized treatment strategies. Treating to protect housing and expand managed fire opportunity are complementary, but not identical strategies, and there may be additional opportunities to enhance the latter by embedding treatment design more closely with operational response planning.

This work provides a contribution in terms of explicitly framing risk analysis and fuel treatment design around federal land and resource management objectives and adds to the knowledge necessary for designing effective landscape fuel treatment strategies that can protect communities and foster more beneficial wildfire on a fire-prone landscape. Successful operationalization of these themes requires embracing all pillars of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, including coordinated management of fuels on various ownerships, home ignition zone mitigation, and cross-boundary fire response planning that can guide fire operations in reducing transmission and expand the decision space for response strategies. We were successful in leveraging recent advancements in spatial wildfire risk assessment to improve the state of knowledge about the source of exposure and risk to human communities, and to examine whether, and how, fuels management can foster more beneficial wildfire on a fire-prone landscape.

Citation

Miller C, Vogler KC, Scott JH, and Thompson MP. 2022. Can landscape fuel treatments enhance both protection and resource management objectives? Joint Fire Sciences Program Final Report for PROJECT ID: 17-1-01-4, 35p.

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