Learn from the burn: The High Park Fire 5 years later

It has been 5 years since the High Park Fire burned over 85,000 acres in Northern Colorado, causing extensive property damage, loss of life, and severe impacts to the water quality of the Poudre River. In the fall of 2016, a conference was organized by the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station and the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed to discuss what has been learned about our response to the fire. Topics covered (and discussed in this article) included how treatment areas were prioritized; the main effects of the High Park fire; the effectiveness of postfire treatments, and where to find the most recent postfire treatment planning tools online