Fuels & Fuel Treatments
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Hosted by the Montana Forest Collaboration Network
OBJECTIVES:
– Discuss the characteristics of cross-boundary projects and how they increase efficiency and effectiveness when managing priority landscapes
– Inspire more cross-boundary work in Montana
– Build awareness of how collaborative partners can support cross-boundary projects
– Discuss the mechanics of planning and implementing forest management projects across land management boundaries
– Share examples of cross-boundary projects in Montana
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Learn about new geospatial data products to support wildfire planning and response including national fuel treatments, fire response districts and communities mapping.
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Behave7 has just been released! We will discuss how Behave v7 differs from BehavePlus v6 by highlighting the Surface, Surface/Crown, Surface/Mortality, and Surface/Contain modules and enhancements that will be included in the next few releases in 2025-2026. This webinar will be useful for both burn bosses and RX-300 cadres.
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Our study aimed to document the expansion of PBAs and provide insight into their structure, function, and impacts. Leaders from 135 known PBAs across the United States were invited to participate in an online survey. Survey results demonstrate a widespread emergence of PBAs in the United States, successfully mobilizing thousands of volunteers to collectively burn more than 34,000 ha annually. PBAs demonstrated that they are reducing myriad barriers to prescribed burning while meeting their goals to broaden access to the use of fire using a neighbors-helping-neighbors model to provide training, pool resources, and reduce the costs of prescribed burning. By including volunteers with diverse levels of experience and backgrounds, PBAs are changing the narrative of who has access to the use of fire.
Webinar recording (43:56)
Join the LANDFIRE Office Hour as Nicole Vaillant (Fire Management Specialist, RMRS, Fire Lab, Wildland Fire Management RD&A) discusses how conducting a Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessment (QWRA) can enhance land management by evaluating wildfire risk and benefits across a landscape. This information can help plan fuel treatments, suppression responses, and fire effects monitoring. QWRA uses LANDFIRE data to model fire behavior, including fire likelihood, intensity, and impacts efficiently. The Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) includes a workflow to make the QWRA process manageable and time efficient.
Webinar recording (7:49)
The recent fires that swept the central and southern plains are catastrophic and exhibited extreme fire behavior. Fire behavior is a result of fuels, weather and topography and in this case the weather and fuels were extreme, and most importantly, the timing was just right. In this webcast, USFS, Research Ecologist Dr. Matt Reeves analyzes rangeland fuel conditions in the southern plains and keys in on the critical aspect of growing season position that is so influential to fire hazard. The conditions have to be just right to produce the type of outcomes witnessed in March and the high amount of standing dead grass (the minimum loading of herbaceous material in the fires we have seen to date was about 1200 pounds per acre on average), with no growth yet of green herbaceous material in the 2025 growing season permitted the extreme fire behavior across the region. All previous recordings are located on the Reading the Tea Leaves page.
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Presenter: Sarah Anderson, Ecologist, Terrestrial Condition Assessment Coordinator
Partner Organization: US Forest Service, Terrestrial Condition Assessment Program, Natural Resources Staff Area, Washington DC Office
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We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We constructed test cases for Southern California of the United States to understand model outcomes across a wide range of fire and fuel management scenarios. Results suggest optimal fuel treatment layouts within the Southern California’s fuel break network responding to various model assumptions, which offer insights for regional fuel break planning. Comparative tests between the proposed optimization model and a rule-based simulation approach indicate that the optimization model can provide significantly better solutions within reasonable solving times, highlighting its potential to support fuel break management and planning decisions.
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We developed species distribution models with dryland-focused predictors to project environmental suitability changes across the entirety of three pinyon and six juniper species ranges. We identify areas of robust suitability change by combining suitability projections from multiple emissions scenarios and time periods. PJ species’ suitabilities respond to many temperature and moisture covariates expected to change in the future. Projected responses among PJ species are highly variable, ranging from modest declines with concurrent gains for overall little net change to wide-ranging declines with no gains for overall range contractions. Environmental suitability is projected to decline broadly across the arid United States Southwest and remain relatively stable across the northern Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Our results suggest unique responses of PJ species to future climate change. We found that species were projected to experience more losses than gains in suitability, for overall range shrinks rather than shifts. Land managers have the capacity to increase woodland resilience to drought, and our results can inform rangeland-wide management planning and conservation efforts in PJ woodlands.
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When we talk about wildfire fuel, we don’t mean gasoline or diesel. The term fuel refers to both dead and living vegetation that can burn, as well as homes and other structures that can ignite. This is particularly important in areas where urban development meets the natural environment, known as the wildland urban interface (WUI). Wildfires are becoming increasingly destructive across many ecosystems, including forests, woodlands, and rangelands. Climate change, human-caused ignitions, the encroachment of homes into the natural environment and the volume, density and health of fuel on the landscape all contribute to this escalating problem. In this fact sheet, we will explore some different “tools in the toolbox” for managing fuel in Nevada.