Research Database
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
The role of fuel treatments during incident management
Year: 2025
BackgroundForest fuel reduction treatments are intended to mitigate negative impacts from wildland fires, protect communities, and support firefighting. Understanding fuel treatment use is important for evaluating treatment effectiveness, which, in turn, can inform the strategic planning and design of treatments. A relatively understudied aspect of fuel treatments is how existing fuel treatments are incorporated into firefighting (i.e., incident management). In this paper, we explore how fuel treatments are used by firefighters and Incident Management Teams during fires …
fuels-reduction treatments, incident command system, firefighting, incident management teams, incident management teams
Publication Type: Journal Article
Geolces: Geospatial Support for Evaluating Wildland Firefighter Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes, and Safety Zones
Year: 2025
Wildland firefighters play a critical role in managing the complex relationship between humans and fire. To reduce the inherent risks that come with this role, firefighters use safety protocols such as lookouts, communications, escape routes, and safety zones (LCES). Currently, LCES implementation is conducted on the ground with limited support from geospatial information, despite the protocol’s inherently spatial nature. This study introduces GeoLCES: an analytical framework designed to enhance LCES implementation using remote sensing and geospatial modeling. GeoLCES comprises three…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Going slow to go fast: landscape designs to achieve multiple benefits
Year: 2025
Introduction: Growing concerns about fire across the western United States, and commensurate emphasis on treating expansive areas over the next 2 decades, have created a need to develop tools for managers to assess management benefits and impacts across spatial scales. We modeled outcomes associated with two common forest management objectives: fire risk reduction (fire), and enhancing multiple resource benefits (ecosystem resilience).Method: We evaluated the compatibility of these two objectives across ca. 1-million ha in the central Sierra Nevada,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Quantifying Western US tree carbon stocks and sequestration from fires
Year: 2025
Background: Forest ecosystems function as the largest terrestrial carbon sink globally. In the Western US, fires play a crucial role in modifying forest carbon storage, sequestration capacity, and the transfer of carbon from live to dead carbon pools. We utilized remeasurements of more than 700,000 trees from 24,000 locations from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) and incorporated supplementary information on wildfires from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity dataset. These datasets allowed us to develop models that examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article