Fuels & Fuel Treatments
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Across all treatment types, forests that underwent fuel treatments had significantly lower fire severity in three of five metrics (crown scorch percent, crown torch percent, and torch height) and 3x more surviving trees.
Conference website.
This conference will host plenary talks, scientific presentations, and field trips exploring the science and management of how to create and maintain resilient forest ecosystems and the human communities embedded in them. Focusing on innovative science, partnerships, and creative management, the conference will host topics on ways to foster forest communities that are resilient to climate stress, disturbance, and societal change. All topics related to forest ecology and management are welcome.
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Given the large size of landscapes, limited management budgets and diverse (sometimes competing) objectives, it can be extremely difficult to know where and how fuel treatments are best undertaken to reduce wildfire risks. While optimization algorithms can help to navigate such complex decisions, the computational cost of applying simulation-based models for predicting wildfire risk has prevented us from using optimization to guide decision-making. To implement optimization by leveraging ‘metamodelling’ approaches that can efficiently estimate the burn probability outputs of simulation models. We use a simulation-optimization approach that links a burn probability (BP) metamodel with the multi-objective optimization algorithm NSGA-II, to develop fuel treatment plans that optimization the trade-offs between different risk reduction objectives and the area treated (AT) by fuel treatment plans in a South Australian case study area. Optimization improves the reduction in BP per area managed by at least 81–284% when compared with existing approaches in our study area. Optimization develops highly effective fuel treatment plans that balance trade-offs between different BP-based objectives and/or levels of resources available for management. Optimization can improve strategic landscape management and offers the potential to help communities better achieve their risk reduction objectives.
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Prescribed fire plays a vital role in protecting California vineyards from the growing risk of wildfires. Still, vintners know firsthand the concerns that smoke can raise during sensitive periods of grape development. On November 5th, CAL FIRE, in partnership with CWI and regional experts, invites California winegrowers, fire practitioners, agencies, and anyone interested in smoke issues around the vintner community to join a special webinar focused on smoke awareness and communication. Together, we’ll share the latest information on prescribed fire practices, notification processes, and smoke management tools, while highlighting how local fire agencies and FireWise communities are working to strengthen coordination with the wine industry.
This interactive session will give California vintners the opportunity to hear directly from fire practitioners, learn strategies to minimize smoke impacts, and build connections with the people shaping prescribed fire efforts in the region. The conversation will also help set the stage for a larger in-person convening in spring 2026, where winegrowers and fire leaders will continue to work together on solutions that support both vineyard health and regional resilience.
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To reduce the risk of wildfire, it’s important to understand where fuel treatments are most likely to succeed. Recent research by Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) scientists and their collaborators provides insights for prioritizing fuel treatments in sagebrush country. The group first developed four spatial layers to characterize sagebrush and pinyon-juniper landscapes: (1) indicators of ecological resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasion, (2) sagebrush associations, (3) persistent pinyon-juniper woodlands, and (4) pinyon-juniper expansion phases. The new indicators of resilience and resistance are dynamic because they are based on climate and soil moisture availability and allow assessment of potential treatment effects in a rapidly changing environment.
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Speaker: Ryan McCliment, LANDFIRE Fire Behavior Specialist, TSSC
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Article describes development and use of the database.
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To investigate the effects of extreme weather and forest management on fire severity, we used light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to characterize pre-fire forest structure across five large wildfires which burned 460,000 ha in the northern Sierra Nevada, California, USA. We found that the odds of high severity fire occurrence in these fires were 1.45 times higher on private industrial land than in publicly owned forests, an effect equivalent to a three standard deviation decrease in fuel moisture. Next, we quantified the relationships between key forest structure metrics and the probability of high severity fire, as well as how these relationships were modified by extreme weather. We found that dense, spatially homogeneous forests with high ladder fuels were more likely to burn at high severity. Extreme weather magnified the effect of density, suggesting that treatments which remove overstory trees are especially important in extreme conditions. Forests managed by private industry were more likely to be dense, spatially homogeneous, and contain high ladder fuel loads than publicly owned forests, offering a potential explanation for the increase in high-severity fire occurrence on private industrial land. Overall, these results illustrate the need for comprehensive forest management to mitigate fire severity in a warmer future.
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We leveraged work identifying sagebrush areas suitable for woody fuel treatments based on resilience to disturbance and resistance to annual grass invasion (R&R) and areas of sagebrush mapped as high conservation value. We used wildfire simulation modeling to estimate annual wildfire exposure (area burned), and identify areas where fire is transmitted to locations of high conservation value that are low R&R. We then optimized treatment location with the ForSys spatial planning system to prioritize treatment of wildfire exposure where treatments are ecologically suitable and explored how operational restrictions (e.g., distance to roads) limited the capacity to treat exposure. Overall, woody fuel treatments could be realistically implemented in only 7.6 % (2.5 million ha) of sagebrush dominated areas. We found that 24 % of the wildfire exposure across all sagebrush associations occurred where fuel treatments were ecologically suitable, but consideration of operational constraints reduced treatable exposure to 9 %. However, there was double the opportunity to reduce transmitted exposure to areas of high conservation value in the operational scenario despite restrictions. Leveraging treatment suitability and sagebrush conservation to strategically design implementable project treatment can help direct limited resources where they are likely to have the greatest ecological and risk reduction benefit.
Webinar recording (51:43).
In this LANDFIRE Office Hour, Matt Germino, Supervisory Research Ecologist, Jake Price, Ecologist, Chad Kluender, Ecologist, and Cara Applestein, Ecologist (U.S. Geological Survey Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center) discuss fuel treatments and management challenges in sagebrush and other semiarid uplands of the western US. The USGS FIREss team (Fires, Invasives, Restoration of Shrub Steppe) discuss their techniques for adapting new technologies to manage invasive annual grass and wildfire risks at landscape scales. They discuss new approaches to modeling and monitoring that are built on LANDFIRE, RAP and other digital tools.