The increased size and severity of wildland fires require increasingly effective BAER treatments. A commonly used BAER treatment is mulching, the spreading of agricultural straw by hand or from the air using a helicopter. While widely used and fairly reasonably effective at reducing runoff and erosion, agricultural straw is not a product native to the forest and often carries invasive weeds. There is a growing consensus among Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams that a mulch product native to the forest would be preferable to agricultural straw. Wood shreds, developed by the Missoula Technology & Development Center, are one such product. Made from post-fire slash and small diameter trees, wood shreds have shown promise in reducing erosion in laboratory tests and on road obliteration projects. Slopes and flow path lengths on BAER treated hillsides typically are both steeper and longer than in the demonstrated road obliteration projects, raising questions on the shreds' effectiveness under the harsher post-fire conditions. The authors propose to develop an optimum blend of wood shreds, specifically tailored to post-fire conditions, and to test their erosion reduction potential at the hillslope scale. This proposal is in response to Joint Fire AFP 2007-1-1 Task 1: "Evaluating the effects, effectiveness, and costs of post-fire restoration and/or rehabilitation methods, processes and tools." The optimum length and width specification for post-fire wood shreds will be determined through rainfall simulation on a fine-grained burned forest soil. Following the determination of the optimum dimensions, the erosion reduction ability of the optimized wood shreds will be field-tested at the hillslope scale using concentrated flow simulation techniques and sediment fences installed on a severely burned hillside. Erosion monitoring will be conducted for a period of two years after the fire. This proposal, if funded, will continue to add to the growing body of knowledge concerning effectiveness of post-fire rehabilitation treatments developed by the authors and others. Results from this study will be disseminated through publications in peer-reviewed journals and a General Technical Report on the use of wood shreds in the post-fire environment. The authors are often called upon to make presentations at regional specialists meetings, thus affording an opportunity for the study results to be directly conveyed to BAER team specialists.