Fuel treatment response groups for fire-prone sagebrush landscapes

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Sagebrush shrublands in the Great Basin, USA, are experiencing widespread increases in wildfire size and area burned resulting in new policies and funding to implement fuel treatments. However, we lack the spatial data needed to optimize the types and locations of fuel treatments across large landscapes and mitigate fire risk. To address this, we developed treatment response groups (TRGs)—sagebrush and pinyon-juniper vegetation associations that differ in resilience to fire and resistance to annual grass invasion (R&R) and thus responses to fuel treatments.