The Wildland Fire Challenge: Focus on Reliable Data, Community Protection, and Ecological Restoration

October 1, 2003

In recent summers, large forest fires have burned millions of acres and hundreds of homes across western states where drought conditions prevail. Alarmed elected officials agree that fuel loads in forests must be reduced to protect communities and restore ecosystems, but they disagree over where and how much.
In part, disagreement stems from available information that exaggerates the amount of forested land at risk from high-intensity wildland fire. Conventional wisdom holds that the greater the perceived risk, the more treatment (logging and thinning) should take place. However, the information used to make these determinations in some proposed wildland fire policies is erroneous.

In this report, we evaluate the quality of information that feeds wildland fire policy, assess the fire management challenge with a focus on community protection, and outline the first steps in a comprehensive strategy to prioritize where fuel reduction and ecosystem restoration measures are needed.

Among our key findings:

• The condition class map prepared by the Forest Service, which is the basis for proposed high-profile wildland fire policy, is not reliable.
  • It depended heavily on unrepeatable “expert opinion,” which led to inconsistent classification of vegetation across regional boundaries.
  • Low resolution and scale incompatibilities in the underlying data led to overestimation of degraded conditions.
  • The use of forest-density data as a surrogate for canopy closure was inherently flawed; forest density and canopy closure are separate, unrelated measures.
• Most important, the condition class map fails to address wildland fire policy’s top priority — community protection.
• Despite widespread media attention on large fires on federal land in the West, most communities at risk from wildland fire are in the eastern United States, particularly the Southeast.
• Most threats to communities at risk from wildland fire arise on state, local, and tribal lands, not on federal land.
• The majority of forests that are good candidates for restoration are on private land in the East; only a small portion of candidate sites are likely to contain byproducts that can be sold to help offset the costs of restoration.
   

Authors: Greg Aplet, Ph.D. and Bo Wilmer