Description: Understanding the capacity to reduce wildfire risk and restore dry forests on Western national forests is a key part of prioritizing new accelerated restoration programs initiated by the Forest Service.

Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application.

The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture faces a future of increasing complexity and risk, pressing financial issues, and the inescapable possibility of loss of human life. These issues are perhaps most acute for wildland fire management, the highest risk activity in which the Forest Service engages.

Communicating emissions impacts to the public can sometimes be difficult because quantitatively conveying smoke concentrations is complicated. Regulators and land managers often refer to particulate-matter concentrations in micrograms per cubic meter, but this may not be intuitive or meaningful to everyone.

Changing climate and a legacy of fire-exclusion have increased the probability of high-severity wildfire, leading to an increased risk of forest carbon loss in ponderosa pine forests in the southwestern USA.

Fuel reduction treatments are being conducted throughout watersheds of the western United States to reduce hazardous fuels in efforts to decrease the risk of high-severity fire. The number of fuel reduction projects that include near-stream environments is increasing, bringing new challenges to riparian management.

This is a manual that helps homeowners and neighborhoods prepare their areas and their homes for wildfire. A fire-adapted community is a community located in a fire-prone area that requires little assistance from firefighters during a wildfire. Residents of these communities accept responsibility for living in a high fire-hazard area.

The Citizen Fire Academy (CFA) program equips participants with the knowledge they need to improve fire preparedness and resiliency on their own properties and in their communities.

This curriculum is designed to teach the basics of fire to non-fire-professional community members, including instructors and landowners, such as ranchers and farmers. The goal is to reduce risk and fire hazard through education and understanding.

Historically, fires have played an integral role in the vitality of our forests. Fire changes the landscape by altering population densities...