Treating Landscapes
"Fire is a landscape process, and it will take landscape change to alter spread patterns," Ager says. Effecting change on large landscapes, however, needs to be strategic.
Using optimized fuel treatments, Ager and Finney have been developing strategies to reduce fire risk in specific areas of the Deschutes National Forest. They simulated 2,000 wildfires that included multiple configurations of fuel reduction treatments — all relegated to spotted owl habitat. By using natural fire breaks, such as lakes and lava flows, and strategically locating fuel treatments to interrupt the flow of fire, they were able to significantly reduce wildfire risk to owl habitat without altering the habitat itself.
Map of the Five Buttes study area showing stands classified as owl habitat in the present study, and stands selected for treatment in the TRT-20 scenario using the spatial treatment priority calculations described in the test. Stands considered for treatment with the spatial priority scheme also had to exceed stand density index thresholds to qualify for treatment.
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They found that fuel treatments on a relatively minor portion of the forested landscape (20%) resulted in a 44% decrease in the probability of spotted owl habitat loss averaged over all habitat stands.
"You can treat fewer acres if you can treat the right acres," Finney says. "If a treatment changes the movement of fire, it changes burn probability and also changes its effects."
Tom Spies, a research ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station and an expert on old-growth forest conservation, notes that it is a revolutionary approach to apply fire behavior models to the challenge of conserving owl habitat on a fire prone landscape. "Where is the best place to put treatments? How much of the landscape do you treat? This work is giving us the tools to answer those questions," Spies says.
The Northwest Forest Plan is restrictive in what managers can do inside and outside of conservation reserves. However, Spies says that these tools are starting to give some hints on how the landscape can be broken up to slow down the negative effects of fire on the conservation areas that the plan was designed to protect.
"We need to get to the point where we are not just blocking things into reserves but are looking at landscape ecological goals," Spies says.
Just as the new risk assessment tools are creating new ways of looking at old questions of fire spread, fuels management and conservation, they also are being used to look at big questions at the national level, such as risk in the interface.
Scalability is one of the real benefits of the new risk frameworks. It can be used to look at project-level trade-offs, as described above, as well as issues such as national budget prioritization.
The National Wildfire Hazard and Risk Assessment eventually will create a nationwide wildfire risk map that links the probability of fire and fire intensity with specific resource benefit and loss functions, along with maps of highly valued resources. The project will be used by policy-makers, planners and managers to prioritize projects and analysis of effective strategies and investments that reduce fire risk.
This framework requires spatially defined estimates of the likelihood of fire entering an individual area, the expected intensity and the effects on values — both losses and beneficial fire effects — not necessarily an easy task at the national level.
National data sets on highly valued resource layers are being compiled from a number of sources for a range of values that include critical habitat, energy infrastructure, recreation and population density. Benefit loss functions were developed by a science panel to quantify the effect of fire on each of the highly valued resources.
Tom Quigley, a science and policy analyst with Management and Engineering Technologies International Inc., says that this type of analysis would not have been possible two to three years ago.
"This is the first approximation to using probability and values at risk at this scale. It isn't the final answer, and as the data gets better the second approximation will be even better," Quigley says. "But this will lead to changes in where and how the work gets done, and it has the potential to make a big difference." He adds that we can begin to have meaningful discussions about prioritizing work to address risk across the entire country.
It may take some time before wildfire risk assessments are fully incorporated into land and fire management at all levels, but these tools are already allowing us to look at some old problems in new ways — and that is a promising start.
Josh McDaniel is editor of Advances in Fire Practice, a website supported by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center that focuses on bringing ideas to the forefront that leaders in fire management, practice and research have identified as innovative and widely applicable. The site provides access to critical and proven fire information and resources. www.wildfirelessons.net/AFP.aspx.
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