Synthesis / Tech Report
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Qualifying studies focused primarily but not exclusively on forested landscapes of the western USA and ranged in size from 200 to 3,400,000 ha. Most studies showed that scenarios with fuel reduction treatments had lower levels of wildfire compared to untreated scenarios. Damaging wildfire types decreased while beneficial wildfire increased as a result of treatments in most cases where these were differentiated. Wildfire outcomes were influenced by five dimensions of treatment design (extent, placement, size, prescription, and timing) and other factors beyond the treatments (weather, climate, fire/fuel attributes, and other management inputs). Studies testing factorial combinations showed that the relative importance of these factors varied across landscapes and contexts.
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This report examines the needs for native plant restoration and other activities, provides recommendations for improving the reliability, predictability, and performance of the native seed supply, and presents an ambitious agenda for action. An Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply considers the various challenges facing our natural landscapes and calls for a coordinated public-private effort to scale-up and secure a cost-effective national native seed supply.
We systematically selected and reviewed 20 thinning studies to analyze key variables affecting machine productivity and harvesting costs. The average cost of forest thinning was lowest for a mechanized whole-tree thinning operation at $21.34/ton or $2,075/ha. Feller-bunchers and skidders showed the highest productivity in felling and extraction machines, respectively.
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Here, we synthesized literature and conducted a survey of forest and fire managers to assess current understanding of how fire interacts with aspen stands, as well as to examine possible factors that influence fire occurrence, behavior, and severity in aspen communities. We found evidence that the presence of aspen reduces fire occurrence, fire behavior, and fire severity, but this effect is dependent on many factors, including the percentage of aspen vs conifers in the overstory, load and type of understory fuels, weather, and season. We did not find any quantitative management guidelines on how to create, maintain, or use aspen stands to reduce fire risk. The large gap between “common knowledge” and empirical evidence regarding aspen’s ability to inhibit fire requires further research.
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This report describes the full range of costs associated with wildland fire in the Western United States (U.S.) to help inform leaders and policymakers working to improve wildfire response and mitigation. Wildfire cost information has, in the past, primarily focused on suppression costs and structure losses; however, as this report shows, there are many other types of costs relating to values such as human health, water supply, transportation, the labor market, and local economics, among others. These less-recognized costs are massive in aggregate.
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Most studies find that fuel treatments are not financially viable for land management agencies based on revenue generated from forest products, biomass, or carbon credits at the time of implementation. Fuel treatments also tend to not be financially viable based on future management costs savings (fire suppression and rehabilitation costs) or averted losses in forest products from wildfire over the lifespan of treatment effectiveness. Similarly, most studies that consider benefits beyond those accruing to land management agencies find that the benefits from any single category (e.g., damage to structures and infrastructure, critical watersheds, air quality, or ecosystem values) are not sufficient to offset treatment costs. Overall, the recent literature suggests that fuel treatment projects are more likely to have benefits that exceed costs if they generate benefits in multiple categories simultaneously. The literature also documents tremendous variability in benefits and costs across regions and between projects within regions, which poses a challenge to reaching general conclusions about the benefits and costs of fuel treatments at programmatic scales, and suggests that practitioners should proceed with caution when trying to extrapolate the benefits and costs for a prospective fuel treatment project from estimates reported in the previous literature.
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This open access book synthesizes current information on wildland fire smoke in the United States, providing a scientific foundation for addressing the production of smoke from wildland fires. This will be increasingly critical as smoke exposure and degraded air quality are expected to increase in extent and severity in a warmer climate. Accurate smoke information is a foundation for helping individuals and communities to effectively mitigate potential smoke impacts from wildfires and prescribed fires. The book documents our current understanding of smoke science for (1) primary physical, chemical, and biological issues related to wildfire and prescribed fire, (2) key social issues, including human health and economic impacts, and (3) current and anticipated management and regulatory issues. Each chapter provides a summary of priorities for future research that provide a roadmap for developing scientific information that can improve smoke and fire management over the next decade.
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To collect partner and employee input on the Wildfire Crisis Strategy 10-year Implementation Plan, the Forest Service and National Forest Foundation hosted a series of roundtable discussions in the winter and spring of 2022.
Individual roundtables were focused on each of the Forest Service regions and at the national level, for a total of ten roundtables. This report is a synthesis of key themes and opportunities for action that emerged from across the ten roundtables. The National Forest Foundation prepared individual summaries of the ten roundtables, available online. Also available is the Intertribal Timber Council’s report on the Intertribal Roundtable they hosted in April 2022 in coordinationwith the Forest Service.
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A spatial overlap analysis was performed and highlighted 45.8 million acres of shared priorities among existing conservation frameworks to help anchor and guide collaborative landscape-scale conservation of areas that still have no to low threats. This information is critical to provide context for decisions about the volume and nature of conservation actions and funding requirements.
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Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at the landscape scale is a key research and management need given the inability to treat all areas at risk from wildfire, and there is a growing body of scientific literature assessing this need. We synthesized existing scientific literature on landscape-scale fuel treatment effectiveness in North American ecosystems through a systematic literature review. We identified 127 studies that addressed this topic using one of three approaches: simulation modeling, empirical analysis, or case studies. Of these 127 studies, most focused on forested landscapes of the western United States. Together, they generally provided evidence that fuel treatments reduced negative outcomes of wildfire and in some cases promoted beneficial wildfire outcomes, although these effects diminished over time following treatment and were influenced by factors such as weather conditions at the time of fire. The simulation studies showed that fuel treatment extent, size, placement, timing, and prescription influenced the degree of effectiveness.