Mark Cochrane will present a webinar on March 27, 1 PM MST. Large wildfire frequency has increased several-fold in recent decades throughout the western United States. These changes have resulted from a combination of human land use practices, altered climates and shifting forest and fire management policies. These fires have had increasingly severe consequences for ecosystems, human health and well being. Managers of wildlands have been handed the task of mitigating the impacts of the inevitable wildfires and fuels management has been implemented as part of a strategy for minimizing fire risk, extreme fire behavior, area affected by wildfire, and both the economic and ecological costs of fires. The Fuel Treatment Effectiveness in the United States (FTEUS) Project is designed to assess how fuels treatments are affecting fire severity and altering the extents of recent wildfires by examining and modeling the degree to which the fuels treatments explain observed patterns of burn severity or fire spread. Until recently, comprehensive analysis of the landscape effects of fuel treatments has been impractical for several reasons, including the relatively small number of implemented fuel treatments that had burned, limited information about the spatial distribution of treatments and wildfires, a lack of fuels information at landscape scales, and insufficient data and computational capacity for remotely sensed monitoring and spatial analyses of fires and their effects. Through the integration of data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) Project, LANDFIRE and detailed treatment information from hundreds of land managers, we have assembled the necessary data to model (FARSITE) the spread and estimate the impacts of large numbers of these fires. Through assessment of many wildfires and multiple simulations of each fire, both with and without fuels treatments, we are now estimating the ways in which fuels treatments have altered the extent and spatial patterning of wildfires in recent years.

Click on the link for the webinar registration page. To register please go to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/327392913.

Hosted by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, International Association of Wildland Fire, and the Joint Fire Science Program.