Empirical Assessments of Wildfire-Treatment Outcomes

As a warming climate increases the likelihood of wildfires, effective fuel management becomes ever more necessary. Improved understanding of the outcome of fuels treatments that are confronted by wildfire will allow managers to make targeted investments in treatments that are most likely to achieve desired outcomes. Outcomes in this research are intentionally tiered to the pillars of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy: reducing vegetation burn severity (a proxy for resilient landscapes), facilitating containment of wildfire spread (a proxy for safe and effective wildfire response), and reducing wildfire impacts to communities and infrastructure (a proxy for fire-adapted communities). 

This research takes a “big data” approach to fuel treatment effectiveness research, evaluating the conditions under which fires burn into thousands of prior fuels treatments, to determine when treatments are more likely to lead to desired outcomes when encountered by wildfires. This project uses scalable datasets as part of a reproducible workflow. We will apply this workflow retrospectively to particular landscapes and time periods of fires interacting with prior fuel treatments to determine which variables (climate, weather, vegetation/fuels, topography, treatment characteristics) increase the likelihood that fuel treatments will be effective at achieving a particular outcome. Using existing data available at landscape scales, including national datasets, when possible, will enable comparisons across research groups, agencies, and landscapes.

• Part one of this research is to develop a scalable, reproducible workflow to develop an analytical database of wildfire-treatment interactions in partnership with several university labs. The workflow will characterize a suite of variables for each wildfire-treatment interaction, including outcomes related to burn severity, containment effectiveness and infrastructure impacts. We will leverage services provided by the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System-Fuel Treatment Effectiveness Monitoring application and systems of record for federal fuel treatments to characterize treatment activities, to better understand how particular treatment approaches may be more or less likely to support desired outcomes on particular landscapes.
• Part two of this research is to apply this workflow to particular landscapes in a suite of case studies. Each case study will focus on either one landscape or a set of landscapes, over a specific time period that could span one or more years. Climate and weather conditions and other factors such as vegetation type or fuel treatment type, will be evaluated for their relative contribution to wildfire outcomes in one particular area, how those factors may change with a warming climate in the future. 

There are many existing national datasets with information on vegetation, climate, and other fire-relevant information that will be involved in workflow development. The case studies will in turn be used to test and further improve the workflow, and to feed into predictive modeling efforts that are used for project planning, layout and design. Developing the workflow and datasets will involve several components or modules, including those related to characterizing burn severity, day/time of burn, fire progression information, fireline effectiveness, infrastructure damage assessments, treatment classification and characterization, change detection & validation, and more.

This project has two main objectives: 

• develop a scalable and reproducible workflow leveraging existing data, and
• apply the workflow to case studies that compare fuel treatment outcomes across regions. 

Outputs

• A fuel treatment effectiveness workshop was held at the Association for Fire Ecology in December 2023. This workshop brought together fuel specialists and researchers to discuss components to a “big data” workflow on landscape scale treatment effectiveness.
• Reports, graphics and publications describing which fuel treatments will be provided to local management units who will then be able to use that information to report back on how effective those treatments were in the field. We will take this information and adapt as needed for the future. 
• This project will create a reproducible workflow that can be used by multiple research and management teams. 
• Produce datasets needed for future decision making.   

Expected Outcomes

• This project is expected to provide a comparison of possible fuel treatments to determine which ones will be the most effective in reducing undesirable wildfire effects as the climate continues to warm. The workflow that will be developed over the course of the research should make evaluations of future fuel treatments more efficient and informative.  

Metric of Success  

• Widespread usage of the techniques developed in this project by a variety of research groups. 
• Improved rapid monitoring and evaluating of fuel treatment outcomes across large landscapes. 
• Increased effectiveness of fuel treatments for specific outcomes. 
• More cohesive research and practitioner community around fuel treatment effectiveness.