Fuels & Fuel Treatments
This webinar will provide an introduction to the fundamental concepts and tools for understanding the who, what, why and how for managing prescribed fire smoke in the Southeast. Speakers from regional air quality regulation programs will discuss topics including: smoke production, smoke prediction, regional regulations, health impacts and more. Following the presentation there will be time for audience Q/A with the speakers.
A 1.5 hour webinar from the EPA Region 4, Georgia Department of Natural Resources Environmental Protection Division, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Air Quality Division, SERPPAS Prescribed Fire and Air Quality Working Group, North Carolina State University, the Southern Fire Exchange, and the University of Florida. Presenters: Scott Davis (EPA R4), Heidi LeSane, (EPA R4), Rick Gillam (EPA R4), Jim Boylan (GA DNR EPD), Randy Strait (NC DEQ AQ), and Jenn Fawcett (SERPPAS/NCSU)
Prescribed fire is an important management tool on federal lands that is not being applied at the necessary or desired levels. Since 2017, we have been investigating policy barriers and opportunities for increasing prescribed fire application on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands in the Western United States. In the first phase of our work, we found that lack of adequate capacity and funding were the most commonly cited barriers to increasing application of prescribed fire, and that successful approaches rely on collaborative forums and positions that allow for communication, problem-solving, and resource sharing among federal and state partners. In 2019, we completed case studies of locations using unique strategies to increase application of prescribed fire in complex land management contexts. This webinar reports on the primary themes from these case studies, highlighting specific examples of practice from different Forest Service and BLM units.
The Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) was designed to store and archive wildland fuel characteristics within fuelbeds, defined as the inherent physical characteristics of fuels that contribute to fire behavior and effects. The FCCS represents fuel characteristics in six strata including canopy, shrubs, herbaceous fuels, downed wood, litter-lichen-moss, and ground fuels. Each stratum is further divided into one or more categories and subcategories to represent the complexity of wildland and managed fuels. A variety of techniques to measure and summarize fuelbed data are detailed in this guide. This guide is organized by strata and categories to facilitate data input into FCCS fuelbeds and provides field sampling forms by stratum. The first section provides an overview of how FCCS reference fuelbeds were constructed from databases, literature sources, and expert opinion. The guide next describes how regional pathway fuelbeds can provide a systematic set of management fuelbeds that track vegetation and fuel succession over time as well as management activities such as prescribed burning and mechanical thinning. The final section details common field sampling methodologies for users who wish to use field measurements to construct FCCS fuelbeds.
In an empirical analysis of shaded fuelbreaks that burned during the 2014 Bald Fire (15,950 ha on the Lassen National Forest, California), we found that overall fire severity was reduced in the treated areas relative to untreated. A non-linear mixed effects model estimates that the reduction was detected more than 400 m into the treated area, greater than the standard width of the prescribed fuelbreak. Both pre- and post-fire species composition differed between treated and untreated forest, with few living stems remaining in the measured untreated areas. In the post-fire treated area, we documented a mixed conifer forest dominated by larger diameter Pinus, implying that the fuelbreak did result in a more resilient post-fire structure and composition. These results indicate that fuelbreak design may need to be wider than generally prescribed and that even during extreme fire conditions fuel treatments can result in resilient forest structures.
Using data collected as part of the Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP), this guide summarizes fuel loads, vegetation cover by functional group, and shrub and tree stem density 10 years after sagebrush and pinyon-juniper reduction treatments. The data was collected at 16 study sites in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Utah, and is summarized by treatment type, region, and roups or woodland development phases based on pre-treatment vegetation. These summarized data an be used by land managers and fire behavior specialists to quickly estimate fuel loads in older treatments or to predict fuel loads 10 years after a potential treatment. These fuel loading data can be used to create custom fuel beds to model fire behavior and effects.
In this issue:
- Fuels Guide for Sagebrush and Pinyon-Juniper Reduction Treatments: 10 years post-treatment
- Biological soil crusts as restoration targets in sagebrush steppe and woodland communities
View article.
Higher tree density, more fuels, and a warmer, drier climate have caused an increase in the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires in western U.S. forests. There is an urgent need to restore forests across the western United States. To address this need, the U.S. Forest Service began the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) to restore four national forests in Arizona. The objective of this study was to evaluate how restoration of ~400,000 ha under the 4FRI program and projected climate change would influence carbon dynamics and wildfire severity from 2010 to 2099. Specifically, we estimated forest carbon fluxes, carbon pools and wildfire severity under a moderate and fast 4FRI implementation schedule and compared those to status quo and no‐harvest scenarios using the LANDIS‐II simulation model and climate change projections.
View article.
This study presents a fuel treatment optimization model to minimize risk to multiple water supplies based on constraints for treatment feasibility and cost. Risk is quantified as the expected sediment impact costs to water supplies by combining measures of fire likelihood and behavior, erosion, sediment transport and water supply vulnerability. We demonstrate the model’s utility for prioritizing fuel treatments in two large watersheds in Colorado, USA, that are critical for municipal water supply. Our results indicate that wildfire risk to water supplies can be substantially reduced by treating a small portion of the watersheds that have dense, fire-prone forests on steep slopes that drain to water supply infrastructure. Our results also show that the cost of fuel treatments outweighs the expected cost savings from reduced sediment inputs owing to the low probability of fuel treatments encountering wildfire and the high cost of thinning forests. This highlights the need to expand use of more cost-effective treatments, like prescribed fire, and to identify fuel treatment projects that benefit multiple resources.
Webinar recording and additional Q and A.
Federal and state agencies across Utah and the Great Basin have been actively treating pinyon and juniper woodlands to improve wildlife habitat, reduce fuel loads, and achieve watershed objectives. Increasingly these activities have been questioned by stakeholder groups and citizens who are concerned about the unintended consequences of such treatments. This webinar addresses some of the recent criticisms of pinyon-juniper treatment, sharing results of research on woody vegetation removal as well as identifying questions that still need to be answered through research and monitoring.
Speakers: Eric Thacker, Mark Brunson
Access report.
Spot fires caused by wind-blown burning embers are a significant mechanism of fire spread in the wildland and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). Fire spread and structure ignition by embers can be characterized by three major processes or mechanisms: ember production, ember transport, and ember ignition of fuel. This study investigates ember production from selected wildland and structural fuels under a range of environmental conditions through full-scale, intermediate-scale, and small-scale laboratory experiments.