During the past two decades, land managers and community leaders in the West have adopted sustainable land management methods to make forests healthier, and to maintain profitable local businesses that are beneficial to their communities.

Wildfire has become a growing threat for communities across the American West and a complex concern for agencies tasked with community protection. This task has grown more difficult due to the increasing inci-dence of large fires and the continued expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area where human habitations and wildland fuels abut or in-termix.

Oregon's State Wood Energy Team (SWET) is a state-level network supported by the United States Forest Service and led by Oregon Department of Forestry. The purpose of the SWET is to bring together experts in biomass energy to support the successful development and implemen-tation of wood energy systems and businesses.

We are conducting a project investigating policies that limit managers’ ability to conduct prescribed fire on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the 11 Western states.

The overall objective of this paper is to clarify areas of debate, clearly define and contrast disparate approaches, and synthesize findings that may help address vulnerability to wildfires and other natural hazards.

People living in the Pacific Northwest confrontrisks associated with environmentalhazards such as wildfire. Vulnerability towildfire hazard is commonly recognized as beingspatially distributed according to geographic conditionsthat collectively determine the probabilityof exposure.

We assessed wildfire mitigation activities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of New Mexico to identifywhich strategies are most effective. First, we modeledhow fuel treatments change wildfire behavior in 12 WUI areas.The second element of our analysis used data from over 2,000assessments of home wildfire hazard to better understand howthose hazards are distributed and change over time.

On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research.