Science for wildfire and safety: Pre-fire management and preparedness
Protecting Communities
The National Fire Danger Rating System sign - a common sight across National Forests.
Smokey Bear’s fire danger sign is more than a roadside attraction; its green-to-red rating is based on the National Fire Danger Rating System, a scientifically rigorous daily assessment of fire risk. The system was developed by Forest Service scientists in 1972 and continues to be maintained and updated by agency researchers.
Wildfire Risk to Communities is a free, easy-to-use website with resources to help communities understand, explore, and reduce wildfire risk. It serves as a starting point for community leaders, elected officials, community planners, and fire managers to assess and reduce risk to homes, businesses, and other resources.
The agency’s Fireshed Registry characterizes, maps, and tracks threats to high-value resources and shows where fuels treatments may limit fire transmission from national forests to other lands.
Forest Service researchers helped develop the Potential Operational Delineations framework. It’s the standard that managers use to work across boundaries and coordinate wildfire response options before fires start. Delineations are bordered by control features, like roads and fuel breaks, that allow for effective fire response.
Agency scientists map population growth in wildland-urban interfaces, areas where houses and buildings mingle with fire fuels. In 2020, nearly one in three homes in the United States fell into these fire-prone areas. These data can help community planners target fuels treatments to best reduce fire risk and develop building codes and evacuation plans.
The Home Ignition Zone concept, which demonstrated that embers—not walls of flames—are the most common ignition source during wildfire, was created by Forest Service scientists. This research informs how we protect homes and communities.
Agency researchers are testing fire-retardant coatings for wood products that may soon help harden homes against wildfires. These coatings protect lives and property, reducing building damage and giving people more time to evacuate. This study builds on decades of related research that informs international building codes and standards.
Decades of fire science come together in WildfireSAFE, a free app that provides simplified access to advanced fire weather information.
The LANDFIRE project uses satellite and ground-based data to map wildland fuels. When combined with information about weather and population, managers can use LANDFIRE data to spatially map wildfire risk.
The Wildfire Research Center pairs agency scientists with non-profits, local fire departments, and other agencies to assess wildfire risk on private lands and seek locally tailored pathways to fire-adapted communities.
On the edge Kelseyville, CA, where homes stand adjacent to a field of brush and chaparal. Areas like these are often referred to as the Wildland Urban Interface, where reducing fuels and wildfire risk reduction is essential.
Agency social scientists help managers design wildfire mitigation programs that account for resident views and preferences. Other social science research shows that residents who engage in risk mitigation activities tend to be better prepared to evacuate during wildfires.
By layering maps of demographics and wildfire risk, agency scientists determined areas where people may be most vulnerable to wildfire. Areas in New Jersey, the Southeast, and parts of the West tend to have more aging people and people living in mobile homes residing in areas with high fire risk. This information can help communities plan ways to help vulnerable people evacuate ahead of wildfires.
Agency scientists project expected fuel conditions during the grazing and fire seasons and share findings during a West-wide rangeland fuel assessment. Additionally, agency scientists monitor rangeland fuel loading across the West through Fuelcast. They derive these data from satellite imagery and update them annually.
Knowing the locations of aquatic invasive species helps helicopter pilots ensure they’re not spreading pests when collecting water to dump on wildfires. Agency scientists aid pilots with an environmental DNA-based monitoring protocol that can detect trace amounts of wildlife DNA in samples as small as a few cups of water.
Agency researchers collaborate with the Joint Fire Science Program's Fire Science Exchange Networks to increase the availability and consideration of science in decision-making, address regional fire management needs, and ensure fire science reaches wide audiences.
Improving Fuels Treatments
Fuels treatments work, as shown in before and after photos taken over decades in fire-prone forests. To help managers best use fuels treatment resources, agency scientists synthesized knowledge on landscape scale fuel treatments across North America. They also synthesized 30 years of studies about fuel treatment effects on wildfire severity. These studies showed that areas where thinning and prescribed burning occurred together experienced lower burn severity than areas that were only thinned or left untreated.
A firefighter from Eglin Air Force Base expertly lights a prescribed fire under directions from fire researchers.
The Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System gives managers a step-by-step process they can use to test impacts of their treatments.
BioSum allows managers to conduct landscape analyses using the Forest Vegetation Simulator and Forest Inventory and Analysis data. Agency scientists used the tool to compare different forest management approaches and their effects on fire risk reduction, economic returns, and other values.
Agency scientists modeled how wildfire risk is changing across large landscapes and at local community scales. This work helps managers not only know whether their projects are meeting desired objectives, but also locate future projects where they’ll have the largest impact.
Agency researchers showed that treating fuels near houses and infrastructure may better reduce fire transmission from federal to private lands than treating fuels further from communities.
Long-term studies suggest that thinning and prescribed fire work together to increase ponderosa pine resilience to both wildfire and bark beetles. Additionally, the benefits of combined thinning and burning minimize fire hazard longer than any other treatment.
Areas where crews conducted fuels reduction treatments or that previously experienced wildfires burned at 50 percent lower severity than untreated areas, showed agency research following a 2022 fire in New Mexico. Performing regular pre-fire maintenance—and managing wildfire for multiple goals—can improve fire outcomes, even in areas that will inevitably burn.
Cows grazing on Pawnee National Grassland.
Knowing where sensitive, threatened, and endangered species live and forage can help managers locate fuels treatment projects. The agency’s cutting-edge habitat monitoring system, Living Maps, monitors habitat for at-risk species. System outputs helped lift an injunction on fuels management and timber harvest on national forests in the Southwest by demonstrating where wildlife and forest management could coexist.
StockSmart enables collaboration among fuel and fire managers and range management professionals to plan and conduct fuel treatments with targeted grazing. This new application already has a rapidly growing user base.
Prescribed Burning
Fire managers use prescribed burns to reduce flammable fuels, slow fire progress, reduce the severity of large wildfires, and mimic the natural role of fire on the landscape. Scientists are advancing understanding of prescribed burns, developing prescribed fire-specific planning tools, and helping managers reduce barriers to largescale burns.
Drones are advancing prescribed fire planning and insights with a bird’s-eye view of areas in need of treatments and forest health and structure.
QUIC-Fire can rapidly predict complex fire behavior and help prescribed fire planners compare, evaluate, and design burn plans. A new model framework will show how fuels, smoke, fire behavior, fire effects, and ignition methods are linked. This update will provide managers with a unified interface that can account for complex ignition patterns. QUIC-Fire also enhances the National Fire Danger Rating System by showing how ignition patterns affect downwind smoke concentrations. This information ensures accurate air quality reporting during prescribed fires.
Advanced fire models offer new possibilities for analysis of fuels treatments and prescribed fires. But these models require detailed 3D fuels data that can be difficult to get, especially for large areas. To address this need, the FastFuels platform combines existing data with innovative modeling techniques to generate 3D fuels data at a landscape scale.
A prescribed burn moves through young ponderosa pine trees at the study site in western Montana.
Agency-developed terrestrial laser scanning tools revolutionize vegetation monitoring, improving the speed with which managers can model a landscape. Updates to the technology can capture the 3D structure of an entire plot in high resolution and measure 200 individual forest characteristics, including surface fuel biomass and volume of surface, ladder, and canopy fuels.
Scientists and partners are developing a forecasting system that predicts optimal prescribed fire conditions weeks to months prior.
An agency-developed review of prescribed fire escapes over the last 10 years in the United States and Australia shows how these events occurred. Scientists and managers alike can use these data to avoid pitfalls in prescribed fire planning and develop new tools for safer, more effective burns.
Agency scientists, alongside staff at southern national forests, used a burn prioritization model to safely increase the number of acres treated. Scientists tailored the model to best support objectives and provided technical training and on-site support.
Through the Eastern Innovation Landscape Network, agency scientists are partnering with researchers from dozens of organizations to conduct a series of prescribed burns spanning more than 3,000 acres. This effort is informing updates to prescribed fire tools like BurnPro3D.
News studies shed light on the social aspects of prescribed fire, such as public acceptance of prescribed fire among ranchers in North and South Dakota.
Agency researchers are finding ways to return fire, including prescribed burns, to fire-adapted wilderness areas.
Mule deer (seen here), elk, horses and cattle seek the green grass that still grows late into the season on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.
Forest Service researchers, alongside managers on an Alabama national forest, conducted 100 prescribed burns in a long-term study that has identified methods for restoring upland hardwood woodlands.
Repeated prescribed fires—with or without mechanical treatments—increased oak-hickory regeneration and ground layer diversity in an Ohio forest, good news for those restoring this biodiverse, fire-adapted, and productive forest type.
Wildfire and prescribed burns may improve habitat for mule deer, black bears, and cougars, showed agency research in the Intermountain West, though high-severity fires initially degrade habitat. Similar research in the Pacific Northwest showed that managed burns and fuels treatments improve mule deer habitat, as the deer preferred thinned and burned areas for up to 15 years after treatment. And still other research showed that birds—harbingers of forest health—can occupy areas burned at a low severity. Low severity burns bring long term benefits when they exclude intense fires that do long-term damage to wildlife habitat.
Forest Service researchers are finding that prescribed fire may reduce tick populations—potentially reducing the prevalence of tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease.
