6 research outputs found
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Letting wildfires burn : modeling the change in future suppression costs as the result of a suppress versus a let-burn management choice
Wildfire management policy over the past century, which attempts to exclude fire from fire-adapted ecosystems, has led to a build-up of fuels across the western United States. As a result, current wildfires contain larger areas of high severity, high intensity burns than seen prior to the policy implementation. There are three leading methods for dealing with this build-up of fuels. The first two, mechanical thinning and prescribed fire, are techniques used to enter an ecosystem and reduce the fuel loads in a specific area. Either can cost anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per hectare. The third method, wildland fire use, is comparatively cheap, while maintaining the benefit of reduced current and future suppression costs. However, it is commonly over-looked, in part because the fire management officer who allows a wildfire to spread when it could have been suppressed can be held liable for damage to property and loss of life, should such events occur.
In this thesis, I describe a method for estimating the future suppression cost savings that result from allowing a fire that occurs in the current year to burn. It was hypothesized that under some known, current conditions, given a random selection of future ignitions and weather, the present value of a landscape would be higher given that a fire in the current year was allowed to burn, rather than suppressed.
A computer program was used to simulate 100-year sample pathways, which included fire and growth events, on a study area in the southeastern Deschutes National Forest. Based on avoided suppression costs, and a crude estimate of timber losses, some of these potential futures demonstrated a higher present value of the landscape resulting from the let-burn management choice. Size of the current fire was the most important characteristics of a given sample pathway in determining the magnitude of the change in future suppression costs. As the size of the current fire increased, the benefit from the sample pathway also increased.
In the future, this analysis can be used as a framework for exploring questions pertaining to the use of weather, fuel, and ignition characteristics of current fires to determine when an ignition should be suppressed, and when it might be advantageous to let a fire burn
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Allowing a wildfire to burn: estimating the effect on future fire suppression costs
Where a legacy of aggressive wildland fire suppression has left forests in need of fuel reduction, allowing wildland fire to burn may provide fuel treatment benefits, thereby reducing suppression costs from subsequent fires. The least-cost-plus-net-value-change model of wildland fire economics includes benefits of wildfire in a framework for evaluating suppression options. In this study, we estimated one component of that benefit – the expected present value of the reduction in suppression costs for subsequent fires arising from the fuel treatment effect of a current fire. To that end, we employed Monte Carlo methods to generate a set of scenarios for subsequent fire ignition and weather events, which are referred to as sample paths, for a study area in central Oregon. We simulated fire on the landscape over a 100-year time horizon using existing models of fire behaviour, vegetation and fuels development, and suppression effectiveness, and we estimated suppression costs using an existing suppression cost model. Our estimates suggest that the potential cost savings may be substantial. Further research is needed to estimate the full least-cost-plus-net-value-change model. This line of research will extend the set of tools available for developing wildfire management plans for forested landscapes.Keywords: bio-economic modelling, wildland fire management, forest economics, forest fire polic
Planning for Future Fire: Scenario Analysis of an Accelerated Fuel Reduction Plan for the Western United States
Recent fire seasons brought a new fire reality to the western US, and motivated federal agencies to explore scenarios for augmenting current fuel management and forest restoration in areas where fires might threaten critical resources and developed areas. To support this effort, we modeled the scheduling of an accelerated forest and fuel management scenario on 76 western US national forests. Specifically, we modeled a 10-year ramp up of current forest and fuel management that targeted the source of wildfire exposure to developed areas and simulated treatment in areas that accounted for 77% of the predicted exposure. We used a sample of 30 future fire seasons to understand how the plan might be impacted by wildfires and treatment. We found that once fully implemented more than 20% of simulated fires on national forests overlapped fuel treatments, and that roughly 20% of the projects were burned prior to their implementation, suggesting that any plan will undergo significant revision during implementation. Treated areas intersected by wildfire accounted for twice the exposure than nontreated areas that also burned. The study demonstrates the use of scenario planning to design a fuel treatment program that targets wildfire exposure to developed areas, and the methods pave the way for expanded use of scenario planning science to analyze and communicate large scale expansion of current forest and fuel management initiatives