Fireline Effectiveness Research: Expanding its utility from post-hoc analysis to daily wildfire operations

Photo Credit

Forest Service photo by Bob Doucette

Firefighters dig a fireline, or a strip of land that deprives wildfire of fuel, to contain fire spread and create workable spaces to implement other fire suppression tactics.

Firefighters create firelines to stop fire spread and support wildfire suppression tactics. Building a fireline involves digging or using machinery to clear a strip of land of its flammable material. It requires planning, demands resources, and can be high-risk, especially when managed under rapidly changing conditions. Understanding why firelines perform well or not – or if they interact with fire at all – is important to the safety of firefighters and communities, protection of valued resources, and efficient use of wildfire response resources. 

Until recently, scientists could only analyze fireline performance after a wildfire event. To do this, the Wildfire Risk Management Science (WRMS) Team developed the Fireline Effectiveness (FLE) Dashboard, which maps fireline and fire perimeter data from past large wildfires; classifies each fireline as held, burned over, or not engaged; and includes metrics of environmental and operational conditions that affect fireline performance outcomes. However, this year, WMRS team researcher Alex P. Arkowitz developed a way to track and understand fireline performance in near-real time, expanding the utility of fireline effectiveness research from post-incident research analysis to decision support during active wildfires.

While the Fireline Effectiveness Dashboard uses annually published, publicly available data from the National Interagency Fire Center, the new workflow collects fireline and fire perimeter data daily from the operational data environment and automatically processes these daily snapshots into incident-level fireline effectiveness reports. The reports summarize how wildfire is interacting with constructed firelines—where line has been engaged, whether those portions appear to have held or been burned over, and where line remains untouched. The reports also track trends over time. 

Photo Credit

Forest Service figure by Alex P. Arkowitz

Maps show the progression of the Lower Sugarloaf Fire in Washington and reported firelines. Taken together, daily fireline and perimeter snapshots provide important insights into suppression activity and fireline performance that is not available from final, post-season datasets alone.

Fireline effectiveness summaries are being shared during national-level wildfire briefings, offering operational personnel a near-real-time view of fireline performance for the first time. According to Brad Pietruszka, researcher and fire management specialist with the Forest Service, “Tracking fireline effectiveness over time on an incident could help inform resource allocation, especially when combined with other real-time analytics like dynamic Potential Control Locations. Together, they can tell us where the biggest bang for the buck would be, not just what happened in the past.”

In addition, these metrics could help managers interpret containment progress and provide context for discussions about evolving suppression challenges. The research team plans to continue refining presentation of the information so managers can easily digest and use it in decision-making on incidents and across geographic areas.  

The daily archive also creates an important new resource for future research. Arkowitz said, “Firelines give us a spatial record of where suppression actions and wildfire intersect. We developed the Fireline Effectiveness Dashboard so we could learn from those interactions after an incident. However, wildfire suppression is dynamic—firelines are built and conditions and objectives change. If we only look at the final map, we lose much of that story. Daily fireline effectiveness reporting helps preserve it, giving operations a timely view of fireline engagement while creating better information for the research that follows.”