Fuels & Fuel Treatments
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Since 2015, the Fishlake National Forest and partners have been restoring pre-colonial disturbance cycles, on a large-landscape scale.
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Study detailed 25 unique potential benefits of fuel treatments and multiple costs. Complexity in benefit-cost analysis of fuel treatments stems from limited data and reference studies, various beneficiaries and accounting stances, spatial and temporal dispersion of benefits and costs, and aggregating multiple benefits with differing outputs and units.
Webinar registration.
Forest Service Research and Development is proud to announce an upcoming series of virtual Deep Dive Panel Discussions intended for fire, fuels and land managers on critical topics associated with fuels and fire management. These panel discussions will provide big picture and synthetic looks at the current state of knowledge and management considerations. Each panel is comprised of expert practitioners and researchers. Sessions will be 90 minutes in length and recorded. Pre-registration is required.
Panelists:
Jeanne Chambers, Research Ecologist Emeritus – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Nicole Molinari, Southern California Province Ecologist – Pacific Southwest Region
Jacqueline Ott, Research Ecologist – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Matt Reeves, National Rangeland Ecologist – National Forest Systems
Stephanie Yelenik, Rangeland Scientist – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Webinar registration.
This is a webinar presented by Forest Service Research and Development, organized by the Rocky Mountain Research Station. It is one of five webinar sessions in a series about Fire Science You Can Use. This webinar event will include the following presentations:
“New Fuels Data and Fire Models for Prescribed Fire” presented by Russ Parsons, Research Ecologist
“From Research to Operations: The Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS)” presented by Wendy Detwiler, Fire Management Specialist
We are currently seeking to make webinars eligible for continuing education credits through the Society of American Foresters and the Society for Range Management.
Webinar registration.
Forest Service Research and Development is proud to announce an upcoming series of virtual Deep Dive Panel Discussions intended for fire, fuels and land managers on critical topics associated with fuels and fire management. These panel discussions will provide big picture and synthetic looks at the current state of knowledge and management considerations. Each panel is comprised of expert practitioners and researchers. Sessions will be 90 minutes in length and recorded. Pre-registration is required.
Panelists:
Jen Croft, National Applied Fire Ecologist Fire and Aviation Management
Stephen Filmore, Fuels Operations Specialist – Pacific Southwest Region
Mark Finney. Research Forester – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Kit O’Connor, Research Ecologist – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Brad Pietruszka, Fire Management Specialist – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Erin Belval, Research Forester – Rocky Mountain Research Station
Webinar registration.
Webinar flyer.
Presenter: Tara Bishop, Utah Valley University
Panelists: Mike Duniway and John Severson, U.S. Geological Survey
Summary: Managing fire and fuels in Colorado Plateau pinyon-juniper woodlands and shrublands remains challenging as land managers navigate complex questions about where treatments will be most effective and what outcomes to expect under different conditions. In this webinar, speakers from Utah Valley University and the U.S. Geological Survey will present outcomes from a Joint Fire Sciences Program project that used a collaborative co-production approach with land managers to develop data-driven State-and-Transition Models for fire-prone Ecological Site Groups in the Upper Colorado River Basin. By integrating 37 years of Landsat imagery with extensive federal monitoring data and new field-collected fuel measurements, the team mapped ecological states through time and quantified how fire severity, drought, and other drivers influence vegetation trajectories across the landscape. The presentation will show how these Ecological Site Group State-and-Transition Models, along with the publicly available datasets and reproducible workflows developed through this project, can inform landscape-scale planning decisions from identifying priority treatment areas to understanding likely post-fire outcomes, supporting more strategic approaches to fire risk reduction, fuels treatments, and post-fire restoration across western rangelands.
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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plans to expand its network of LFBs in the Great Basin by over 17 000 km. However, uncertainties remain regarding their effectiveness in reducing wildfire-related impacts. To address this knowledge gap, we estimate avoided wildfire costs attributable to fuel breaks in the Twin Falls BLM District of south-central Idaho. Our analysis focuses on the 2019 Pothole fire, which was contained in part due to the presence of LFBs. By developing a counterfactual simulated scenario in which the fire did not intersect the fuel breaks and using historic data on suppression expenditures, postfire rehabilitation costs, and grazing-related forage losses, we estimate the net economic benefits associated with fuel break presence. This case study provides actionable insights for land managers by quantifying the potential cost savings from fuel break infrastructure. Our findings indicate that in the northern Great Basin, LFBs may significantly reduce wildfire management costs, supporting their strategic deployment as part of a broader landscape-scale fire mitigation approach.
Webinar registration.
Rocky Mountain Research Station is pleased to announce the first in our 2026 webinar line up: Science for Productive Forests and Rangelands. These webinars will dive into science about productive rangelands, forest products, regeneration after wildfire, forest measurements, and pollinators. Expect three short presentations followed by Q&A each day.
Science for Prescribed Fire in the Great Plains presented by Jacqueline Ott, Research Ecologist
The Climate Smart Restoration Tool v2.0: A Guide to Seed Transfer in a Changing Climate presented by Elizabeth Milano, Research Biological Scientist
Learning from Long-Term Studies at the Desert Experimental Range: How Grazing, Drought, and Invasive Species Alter Rangelands presented by Robert Heckman, Research Botanist
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This study investigates the key drivers influencing prescribed fire effects across 16 sites in northern and central California, with particular emphasis on how operational decisions by fire practitioners shape burn outcomes. Data from the California Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program revealed that prescribed fires reduced total fuel loads by an average of 60 %, with greater consumption of postfrontal smoldering fuels (coarse fuels, 65 %) compared to frontline spreading fuels (fine fuels, 49.0 %).
Crown scorch height showed a strong relationship to crown base height (R2 = 0.37–0.86), suggesting that practitioners use crown base height as a visual indicator to control fireline intensity and avoid crown damage. This relationship may partially explain fuel consumption patterns, as crown avoidance strategies can influence fire behavior and intensity. Additionally, we documented a compensatory relationship between live and dead fuel moisture content across burn seasons, indicating that practitioners strategically select burning windows that maintain fireline intensity within controllable parameters regardless of season.
Our findings demonstrate that human decisions fundamentally modify prescribed fire behavior to maintain safety parameters, often constraining outcomes to conservative ranges that may compromise treatment effectiveness. Understanding and accounting for these human factors is crucial to encouraging a more effective use of prescribed fires in the future. We recommend that future research explicitly include operational parameters and practitioner decision-making processes in assessing prescribed fire science, balancing safety considerations with goals for ecological restoration.