Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction

Background

Background

Restoring a low-intensity, frequent-fire regime in fire-prone forests offers a promising natural climate solution. Management interventions that include prescribed fire and/or mechanical treatments have effectively reduced fire hazards in the Western United States, yet concerns remain regarding their impact on forest carbon storage.

Wild and intentionally ignited fires are not new to North American landscapes or to the Indigenous cultures whose ancestral places encompass them. For millennia, Indigenous fire stewardship has been regionally and locally distributed across North American ecosystems.

Background

The frequency, severity, and scale of extreme wildfire events is increasing globally, with certain regions such as the western United States disproportionately impacted. As attention shifts toward understanding how to adapt to and recover from extreme wildfire, there is a need to prioritize where additional research and evidence are needed to inform decision-making.

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity.

Fire refugia are unburned and low severity patches within wildfires that contribute heterogeneity that is important to retaining biodiversity and regenerating forest following fire. With increasingly intense and frequent wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, fire refugia are important for re-establishing populations sensitive to fire and maintaining resilience to future disturbances.

Protecting habitat threatened by increasing wildfire size and frequency requires identifying the spatial intersection of wildfire behavior and ecological conditions that favor positive management outcomes.

Large wildfires, the dominant natural disturbance type in North American forests, can cause significant damage to human infrastructure. One well-known approach to reduce the threat of wildfires is the strategic removal of forest fuels in linear firebreaks that segment forest landscapes into distinct compartments.