Landscape Simulator (LSim): Modeling Fire for Resilient Forest Futures

The Landscape Simulator (LSim) is a spatially explicit forest landscape modeling framework that researchers, analysts, and land managers can use to evaluate wildfire and forest management strategies across large, fire-prone landscapes of the western United States. LSim helps translate today’s management decisions into long-term outcomes by simulating how forests, fuels, and wildfire interact over decades under alternative management approaches.

Photo Credit

USDA Forest Service photo by Your Forests Your Future

Forest landscape models like LSim provide a way to explore future conditions that cannot be tested empirically, including rare but consequential wildfires. They allow managers to evaluate trade-offs among wildfire risk, forest structure, carbon dynamics, and ecological resilience. LSim outputs illustrate how different management strategies influence wildfire behavior, fire severity, and landscape condition through time, helping to clarify both short-term risks and long-term benefits.

LSim integrates two well-established models grounded in extensive historical and empirical data:

1. Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), which models forest growth, mortality, and treatment effects at the stand level
2. Wildfire Risk Simulator (FSim), which simulates the occurrence, spread, and intensity of large wildfires across landscapes

By linking forest dynamics with wildfire processes, LSim provides a flexible platform for simulating real-world management prescriptions, including mechanical treatments, prescribed fire, suppression strategies, and resource objective wildfire. This allows silvicultural prescriptions developed in the field to be evaluated at landscape scales, capturing cumulative and emergent effects that extend far beyond individual projects.

To access and use LSim, contact Jesse Young (jesse.young@usda.gov).

Example Applications of LSim

LSim has been applied to a wide range of management and research questions, including:

• Evaluating how accelerated forest restoration influences future area burned, fire severity, wildfire exposure to the wildland–urban interface (WUI), and timber production
• Assessing how changes in climate alter future wildfire activity and risk across fire-prone landscapes
• Comparing alternative restoration and wildfire management strategies, including managed wildfire, and their long-term effects on fire behavior, forest structure, and resilience
• Quantifying trade-offs among fire use, carbon stability, old-forest structure, and ecosystem function under different management pathways

Purpose

By coupling forest growth, disturbance, and wildfire at landscape scales, LSim enables managers to move beyond fire avoidance and response toward strategic fire stewardship—designing forests that are more resilient to wildfire, drought, and climate change.

Application and Overview