Natural resource managers in the US are implementing large-scale plans to reduce wildfire risk and increase resilience to climate change

This $478,832 federal Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Joint Fire Science Program (CFDA #15.232) will fund research and tool development to improve landscape-scale fuel treatment strategies for reducing wildfire risk and increasing climate resilience. The project, led by the University of Montana, will assess how the spatial configuration, topographic locations, and types of fuel treatments impact fire behavior and burn severity across landscapes. Key activities include developing a quantitative approach for evaluating treatment effectiveness, producing data visualizations, and conducting statistical modeling. The research aims to provide managers with actionable information to guide future fuel treatment planning and implementation. As part of the project, the University of Washington will develop a web-based tool to semi-autonomously analyze geospatial data, match treated and untreated areas, and model treatment effects. The award period runs from September 2023 through December 2027.

There is increasing recognition that a strategic combination of treatments and beneficial wildfire is needed to achieve the enormous scale and accelerated timelines of these plans. Yet, relatively little is known about how treatments affect landscape-level fire behavior beyond the footprint of treatments. Additionally, managers are unable to evaluate treatment efficacy fully because fire management actions during wildfires are generally not incorporated into fuel treatment evaluations. Therefore, managers lack specific, actionable information on the effectiveness of past treatments to guide them in deciding how to apply treatments in the future. We will address this pressing need through research and tool development with managers that will inform landscape-scale fuel treatment strategies by using empirical data to assess (a) how the density, spatial configuration, topographic locations, and types of treatments across a landscape impact burn severity and burn severity pattern in the context of environmental setting, fire weather, and management actions and (b) how the transmission of fire into and out of treatments impacts fire behavior and resulting burn severity. This project will provide a robust, quantitative approach for evaluating treatment effectiveness of different treatment types at treatment- and landscape-levels in different combinations of fire weather, topography, and treatment type and timing, facilitating new methods of assessing landscape fuel treatment strategiesin regards to treatment size, location, and configuration. Study results will help vegetation and fuels managers improve strategic planning and prioritization of treatments to increase positive wildfire outcomes while supporting safe and effective fire management operations to minimize damage to people, property, and infrastructure.