Tetons Interagency Wildfire Risk Assessment (TIARA)

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.