Risk Assessment and Analysis

Background

Burned area and wildfire damages in the western United States (WUS) have increased dramatically in recent decades. Wildfire frequency, however, has shown trends that vary by data set, region, and fire size.

Decision support tools play an important role in determining how to strategically allocate limited wildfire risk reduction resources. However, common decision support tools generally do not account for socioeconomic or demographic characteristics which influence community vulnerability to wildfire, resulting in potentially biased risk reduction investment strategies.

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