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Fuels and Fuel Treatments

Displaying 1 - 10 of 226

Prescribed fire, managed burning, and previous wildfires reduce the severity of a southwestern US gigafire

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

In many parts of the western United States, wildfires are becoming larger and more severe, threatening the persistence of forest ecosystems. Understanding the ways in which management activities such as prescribed fire and managed wildfire can mitigate fire severity is essential for developing effective forest conservation strategies.

Ladder fuels rather than canopy volumes consistently predict wildfire severity even in extreme topographic-weather conditions

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

Drivers of forest wildfire severity include fuels, topography and weather. However, because only fuels can be actively managed, quantifying their effects on severity has become an urgent research priority. Here we employed GEDI spaceborne lidar to consistently assess how pre-fire forest fuel structure affected wildfire severity across 42 California wildfires between 2019–2021.

An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions.

Unlocking the potential of Airborne LiDAR for direct assessment of fuel bulk density and load distributions for wildfire hazard mapping

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

Large-scale mapping of fuel load and fuel vertical distribution is essential for assessing fire danger, setting strategic goals and actions, and determining long-term resource needs. The Airborne LiDAR system can fulfil such goal by accurately capturing the three-dimensional arrangement of vegetation at regional and national scales.

Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area

Year of Publication
2024
Publication Type

Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables.