Contemporary Wildfire Hazard on the Black Hills National Forest

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In September 2021, the Black Hills National Forest (BKF) contracted with Pyrologix to conduct a spatial wildfire hazard assessment across the BKF. The BKF is set to undergo Forest Plan Revision and the Potential Operational Delineations (POD) planning process and identified the need for comprehensive fire modeling to provide supporting documentation. The results of this wildfire hazard assessment will be used by fire and fuels specialists to support those efforts.

The wildfire hazard assessment products were needed in a relatively short timeframe. For this reason, existing fuel data from LANDFIRE and previously completed national burn probability results were leveraged as inputs to the WildEST (Wildfire Exposure Simulation Tool) fire hazard modeling.

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Contemporary Wildfire Hazard Across California

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In July 2019, the Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service contracted with Pyrologix to conduct a spatial wildfire hazard assessment across all land ownerships across the state of California. The project consisted of three parts: fuelscape calibration, wildfire hazard assessment, and summary of wildfire risk to California communities.

In early March 2020, just days before nationwide shutdowns due to Covid-19, Pyrologix led two inperson fuel calibration workshops hosted by the Region and attended by a wide array of local, state, and federal specialists in the fields of fuel characterization, fire ecology, and fire behavior modeling. By mid-summer 2020 Pyrologix produced a 2020 fuelscape.

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A fuelscape for all land ownerships in the state of California

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The Pacific Southwest Region of the USDA Forest Service contracted Pyrologix to complete an assessment of wildfire hazard across all land ownerships in the state of California. The foundation of any wildfire hazard assessment is a current-condition fuelscape, updated for recent disturbances and calibrated to reflect the fire behavior potential realized in recent historical wildfire events. We leveraged LANDFIRE 2016 Remap 2.0.0 (LF Remap) data to generate a calibrated fuelscape for use in this statewide assessment.

LF Remap was released in the spring of 2019 with significant improvements from previous versions of LANDFIRE, including the use of new satellite imagery and continuous vegetation cover and height classifications1 . LF Remap data represents ground conditions circa 2016, based on 2013-2017 Landsat 8 satellite imagery with priority given to 2016 imagery2 . Starting from LF Remap as the most up-to-date fuel and vegetation available for CA, we aimed to calibrate the fuel mapping to observed fire behavior, make use of the new LF Remap data and features to the fullest extent, update the fuelscape to reflect recent disturbances, and produce a landscape absent of seamlines due to LANDFIRE map zone boundaries.

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USFS Region 4 Wildfire Hazard Report: methods and results

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The purpose of the USFS Region 4 Quantitative Wildfire Hazard Report is to provide foundational information about wildfire hazard across the geographic area. Such information supports wildfires, regional fuel management planning decisions, and revisions to land and resource management plans. The R4 analysis considers:

  • likelihood of a fire burning,
  • the intensity of a fire if one should occur

To manage wildfire in Region 4, it is essential that accurate wildfire hazard data, to the greatest degree possible, is available to drive fire management strategies. These hazard outputs can be used to inform the planning, prioritization and implementation of prevention and mitigation activities, such as prescribed fire and mechanical fuel treatments. In addition, the hazard data can be used to support fire operations and aid in decision making for prioritizing and positioning of firefighting resources.

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Exposure of human communities to wildfire in the Pacific Northwest

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At the request of the United States Forest Service Pacific Northwest Regional Office, Pyrologix1 assessed the exposure to wildfire of housing units within named human communities across the Pacific Northwest Region (Oregon and Washington). The purpose of the assessment was to identify the communities most threatened by wildfire. The fifty most-threatened communities in each state were identified.

These results have several applications. A home buyer can use these results for comparing the relative wildfire exposure of homes in different communities; homeowners can gauge their wildfire exposure compared to their peers in neighboring communities. Governments and other organizations can potentially use the results to prioritize communities for home-loss mitigation efforts, allocate mitigation funding, inform building codes, and guide residential development. Finally, land owners and land management agencies can use the exposure-source results to identify locations within their ownerships that produce damaging wildfires.

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Teton Interagency Wildfire Hazard Report: Methods and Results

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The purpose of the Teton Interagency Wildfire Hazard Report is to provide foundational information about wildfire hazard across the geographic area. Such information supports wildfires, regional fuel management planning decisions, and revisions to land and resource management plans.

The TIARA analysis considers:

  • likelihood of a fire burning,
  • the intensity of a fire if one should occur

To manage wildfire in TIARA, it is essential that accurate wildfire hazard data, to the greatest degree possible, is available to drive fire management strategies. These hazard outputs can be used to inform the planning, prioritization and implementation of prevention and mitigation activities, such as prescribed fire and mechanical fuel treatments. In addition, the hazard data can be used to support fire operations and aid in decision making for prioritizing and positioning of firefighting resources.

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In situ and transmitted housing-unit exposure to wildfire in the Pacific Northwest

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At the request of the United States Forest Service Pacific Northwest Regional Office, Pyrologix assessed the exposure of housing units to wildfire in Oregon and Washington. There are two approaches to such an assessment. The first—called an in situ analysis—rates the exposure of housing units where they exist on the landscape. The second approach rates the potential for wildfires originating in one part of the landscape to expose housing units in another. This second approach is often referred to as a wildfire transmission, risk-source, or exposure-source analysis. This report presents results for both approaches.

This work was completed as a companion to the ‘Exposure of human communities to wildfire in the Pacific Northwest’ report (Scott et al., 2018). The purpose of the assessment was to identify the counties and land ownerships on which damaging wildfire tend to occur and originate. These results can be used in wildfire management and mitigation planning by identifying counties with the greatest annual exposure of housing units.

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Wildfire Threat to Key Resources on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest

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Following a severe bark beetle outbreak, the TEAMS Enterprise unit conducted a “Rapid Assessment of Management Opportunities” for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest (BDNF). As part of that assessment, TEAMS partnered with Pyrologix to conduct a multi-resource wildfire risk assessment. For this project, we adapted a quantitative risk assessment approach developed for national application to meet the needs of the BDNF. The objective of this assessment was to identify potential vegetation management opportunities to meet forest plan objectives (protect and enhance key resources). This was accomplished by quantifying threat and benefit in the analysis area and summarizing those results to the BDNF planning units. View the PDF here.

Quantifying the Threat of Unsuppressed Wildfires Reaching Adjacent Wildland-Urban Interface

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Over the last few years, Pyrologix has focused its work on applying fire science to find solutions to real land management problems. The management applications themselves are often worthy of sharing with a larger audience. On a number of its U.S. Forest Service projects, Pyrologix has worked with colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Research Station to publish, in journal articles and technical reports, the results of its application-oriented projects, information that would otherwise remain in the files of a local land management unit.

In 2012, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute funded the preparation of a manuscript entitled “Quantifying the threat of unsuppressed wildfires reaching the adjacent wildland-urban interface on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming, USA”. The manuscript was based on work we did for the Bridger-Teton National Forest with our partner at the TEAMS Enterprise unit. We used a stochastic wildfire simulator, called FSim, to assess the potential for wildfires igniting in a relatively remote area of the landscape to reach areas of residential development. The resulting manuscript is available here.

Tetons Interagency Wildfire Risk Assessment (TIARA)

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When most people hear the words “Grand Teton”, they conjure an image of impossibly steep mountains of rock and ice. We’re not most people. We see the Tetons and think about wildfire—how it affects the resources and assets on the landscape. In 2011, Pyrologix partnered with the TEAMS Enterprise Unit of the U.S. Forest Service to carry out an interagency wildfire risk assessment for Grand Teton National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. We collected historical weather and fire occurrence data; pulled together spatial information on fuel, vegetation, and topography; guided land managers in the selection and characterization of resources and assets at risk of damage by wildfire; and simulated wildfire occurrence, growth, suppression and intensity across a landscape spanning nearly 20 million acres. We then pulled all of this information together into a comprehensive, interagency, multi-resource assessment of wildfire hazard and risk. The project was documented in this internal report, and was used to illustrate the landscape-scale risk assessment process in this publication.