Research and Publications
View article.
From 1992 to 2024, in all 8 contiguous-US Forest Service regions combined, wildfire-ignition density was lowest in designated wilderness areas (1.75 fires/1000 hectares), followed closely by Inventoried Roadless Areas (1.97 fires/1000 ha). The highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands within 50 m of roads (7.99 fires/1000 ha), and the second highest wildfire-ignition density was in other national forest lands outside of the 50-m road buffers but not in wilderness or roadless areas (3.50 fires/1000 ha). For human-caused, natural, and undetermined fires, wildfire-ignition density decreased as distance to road increased, irrespective of designation categories such as “wilderness” or “roadless.” In lands between 0 and 250 m from roads, 6 fires ignited per 1000 ha, whereas fewer than 2 fires ignited per 1000 ha at a distance class of over 2000 m from roads. Mean fire size varied by where the fire started: it was greatest in wilderness areas (239 ha), followed by Inventoried Roadless Areas (135 ha), roaded national forest lands outside of Inventoried Roadless Areas, wilderness, and the 50-m buffer (62 ha), and lands within the 50-m road buffer (49 ha). We found, however, that the largest 2% of fires had similar mean sizes and ignition densities regardless of where they started.
View article.
Using measurements of aeolian sediment flux and plant community development from seven sites following wildfire, we identified ordinal plant communities to develop a quantitative index of site stability post-wildfire. Using these plant communities, we modeled how management focusing on reducing a single plant functional group (e.g., fuel treatments) may impact wind erosion as plant communities redeveloped after wildfire. We found the outcome of management focused on a single functional group has different impacts on wind erosion based on its surrounding plant community and time since wildfire.
View article.
Access data.
Wildfires are increasingly impacting social and environmental systems in the United States (US). The ability to mitigate the adverse effects of wildfires increases with understanding of the social, physical, and biological conditions that co-occurred with or caused the wildfire ignitions and contributed to the wildfire impacts. To this end, we developed the FPA FOD-Attributes dataset, which augments the sixth version of the Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA FOD v6) with nearly 270 attributes that coincide with the date and location of each wildfire ignition in the US. FPA FOD v6 contains information on location, jurisdiction, discovery time, cause, and final size of wildfires in the US between 1992 and 2020 . For each wildfire, we added physical (e.g., weather, climate, topography, and infrastructure), biological (e.g., land cover and normalized difference vegetation index), social (e.g., population density and social vulnerability index), and administrative (e.g., national and regional preparedness level and jurisdiction) attributes. This publicly available dataset can be used to answer numerous questions about the covariates associated with human- and lightning-caused wildfires. Furthermore, the FPA FOD-Attributes dataset can support descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive wildfire analytics, including the development of machine learning models.
View article.
Study used over 500,000 wildfire ignition records from 2000 to 2020 to develop machine learning models that predict daily ignition probability across the WUS and incorporate a wide range of physical, biological, social, and administrative variables. A key innovation of this work is development of novel sampling techniques for representing ignition absence. Unlike traditional purely random sampling or hyper-sampling, which does not account for temporally autocorrelated factors (such as droughts, insect outbreaks, and heatwaves) and spatially autocorrelated factors (such as proximity to human settlements, infrastructure presence, and fuel type), we introduce spatially and temporally stratified sampling of ignition absence. By drawing absence samples near the location and time of historical ignitions, we better captured the complex environmental and anthropogenic conditions associated with fire occurrence or lack thereof. Models trained without stratified sampling produced ignition probability maps that consistently overestimated fire risk during high fire danger periods, whereas models incorporating stratified fire absence samples more accurately captured the spatial and temporal variability of fire potential and achieved predictive accuracies exceeding 95%. In addition to operational utility for fire prevention and resource allocation, our approach offers insights into the drivers of wildfire ignitions and highlights the value of incorporating spatial and temporal structure in absence sampling for wildfire modeling.
View article.
Wildfire induced large declines in the live overstory biomass for control (47%) and prescribed fire plots (32%) though remotely sensed burn severity was lower in treated plots relative to the control. Downed woody fuels and duff were consumed equivalently in both control and treated plots, ranging from 24 to 99% consumption. Grass loading increased 78-fold in control plots and 22-fold in prescribed fire plots after wildfire, largely driven by invasive cheatgrass, which comprised 79% to 99% of grass cover. However, overstory canopy cover was negatively correlated with cheatgrass loadings (R2 = 0.81) and cover (R2 = 0.84).
View article.
Spring warming treatment effects varied with yearly weather and species emergence timing relative to the rest of the seeded species. Later-emergence timing was associated with lower emergence rates, particularly with late spring warming, and lower survival with early spring warming, but higher survival without warming or with late spring warming. Seed mix scenarios tuned to warming treatment and yearly weather outperformed early- or late-emergence timing and even proportion mixes. Early spring warming increased invasive annual grass abundance, which was associated with lower survival of seeded species.
View article.
Beginning in the 2010s, structured wildfire risk assessment tools were developed to provide a framework for prioritizing management actions based on wildfire hazard, ecological response, and decision-maker values. Yet, more than a decade later, operationalizing risk assessments remains challenging and limited by disconnected tooling, static data, and workflows that are difficult to scale or adapt for collaborative decision-making. Here, we present the Vibrant Planet Platform (VPP), a modular, cloud-based decision-support system that integrates fire simulation, ecological response functions, multi-objective optimization, and user input into a unified planning environment. The platform enables risk-based scenario planning across landscapes up to millions of hectares by linking validated modeling tools (e.g., FSim, FVS, ForSys) with high-resolution, up-to-date vegetation and infrastructure data. We describe the challenges inherent to operationalizing risk assessments, demonstrate how VPP addresses them through architectural and methodological design, and highlight real-world deployments in U.S. risk-exposed landscapes and communities. We outline a multi-tiered validation framework for assessing model relevance, internal coherence, predictive performance, and field alignment. VPP illustrates how structured decision-making can be operationalized at broad scales, offering a model for ecological planning tools that are rigorous, transparent, and participatory.
View article.
Widespread impacts of landscape fire on ecosystems, societies, and the climate system itself have heightened the need to understand the potential future trajectory of fire under continued climate change. However, the complexity of fire makes climate change impact assessment challenging. The climate system influences fire in many ways, including through vegetation, fuel dryness, fire weather, and ignition. Furthermore, fire’s impacts are highly diverse, spanning threats to human and ecological values and beneficial ecosystem and cultural services. Here, we discuss the art and science of projecting climate change impacts on landscape fire. This not only includes how fire, its drivers, and its impacts are modeled, but critically it also includes how projections of the climate system are developed. By raising and discussing these issues, we aim to foster the development of more robust and useful fire projections, help interpret existing assessments, and support society in charting a course toward a sustainable fire future.
View article.
In historically frequent fire forests, wildfires are burning larger areas and driving forest loss across western North America, yet they also produce extensive low- to moderate-severity effects that can be leveraged to harden landscapes against future high-severity fire. Here, we operationalize prior conceptual calls by presenting a framework that identifies opportunities to leverage recent wildfire footprints via three management pathways to increasing resistance to high-severity fire: create (use burned edges as containment lines to treat adjacent unburned forest), enhance (apply mechanical treatment and prescribed fire or wildfire managed for resource objectives to areas with one prior beneficial disturbance), and maintain (sustain high-resistance stands with recurring fire). We quantify the extent of these opportunities across California’s Sierra Nevada yellow pine-mixed conifer forests at the Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) scale and outline policy options to act within limited post-fire windows. This work can support increasing resistance to high-severity fire across the landscape, highlighting how leveraging wildfire has the potential to save time and money, lower operational risk under suitable conditions, and promote pyrodiversity and biodiversity.
View factsheet.
When wildland firefighters head into the field, they know the work is dangerous; but until now, agencies lacked detailed data on exactly which activities and hazards posed the greatest threats. A recent analysis of five years of serious firefighter injuries offers new insights.