Fuels and Fuel Treatments

Fuel treatment effectiveness is often evaluated with fire behavior modeling systems that use fuel models to generate fire behavior outputs. How surface fuels are assigned,either using one of the 53 stylized fuel models or developing custom fuel models, can affect predicted fire behavior.

Effective wildfire management in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) depends on timely data on forest fuel loading to inform management decisions.

Mastication is an increasingly common fuels treatment that redistributes “ladder” fuels to the forest floor to reduce vertical fuel continuity, crown fire potential, and fireline intensity, but fuel models do not exist for predicting fire behavior in these fuel types.

Fuel reduction treatments are implemented in the forest surrounding the wildland–urban interface (WUI) to provide defensible space and safe opportunity for the protection of homes during a wildfire.

Fuel consumption specifies the amount of vegetative biomass consumed during wildland fire. It is a two-stage process of pyrolysis and combustion that occurs simultaneously and at different rates depending on the characteristics and condition of the fuel, weather, topography, and in the case of prescribed fire, ignition rate and pattern.

A principal challenge of federal forest management has been maintaining and improving habitat for sensitive species in forests adapted to frequent, low- to moderate-intensity fire regimes that have become increasingly vulnerable to uncharacteristically severe wildfires.

Fuel-reduction treatments are used extensively to reduce wildfire risk and restore forest diversity and function. In the near future, increasing regulation of carbon (C) emissions may force forest managers to balance the use of fuel treatments for reducing wildfire risk against an alternative goal of C sequestration.

The decrease in fire activity has been recognized as a main cause of expansion of North American woodlands. Piñon-juniper habitat in the western United States has expanded in area nearly 10-fold since the late 1800s. Woodland control measures using chainsaws, heavy equipment, and prescribed fire are used to restore sagebrush steppe plant communities.

Rapid and broad-scale forest mortality associated with recent droughts, rising temperature, and insect outbreaks has been observed over western North America (NA). Climate models project additional future warming and increasing drought and water stress for this region.

Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire area.