Risk Assessment and Analysis

It is widely perceived that wildfire activity has increased across the western United States (WUS), with studies generally focusing on large wildfires. This study examines changes in the number of wildfire ignitions and burned area in the WUS using a comprehensive record of more than 750 000 wildfire incidents from 1992 to 2020 across biophysical gradients, seasons, and ignition causes.

Forest treatments such as prescribed burns, mastication, and thinning are widely implemented across the western USA to reduce fuels and enhance wildfire resilience. These practices also influence snow accumulation and melt, which, in turn, affect snow storage and duration.

Linear fuel treatments, Fuel Break Networks, are widely implemented in California, USA fuel types to improve firefighter safety and facilitate fire containment. Despite frequent construction, landscape scale evaluations of their effectiveness with fire modeling remain limited in this region.

Background

Wildfires have increasingly affected human and natural systems across the western United States (WUS) in recent decades. Given that the majority of ignitions are human-caused and potentially preventable, improving the ability to predict fire occurrence is critical for effective wildfire prevention and risk mitigation.

Aim

Background

We developed the WULFFSS, a stochastic monthly gridded forest-fire model for the western United States (US). Operating at 12 km resolution, WULFFSS calculates monthly probabilities of fires that burn at least 100 ha of forest area as well as the forest area burned per fire.

Background

During periods of heightened wildland fire activity in the United States, multiagency coordinating groups must prioritize among multiple on-going fires to allocate scarce suppression resources.