With or without roads, US forests burn at a similar rate, researchers claim

McKinley Fire Alaska Parks highway

Over 40 years of wildfire-ignition data across 11 western U.S. states showed that national forest areas classified as “roadless” didn’t burn more than national forest land with roads, further fueling discussion around the Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ intent to repeal the 2001 “Roadless Rule.”

Rollins has stated that the nation’s protected forests need to be opened to new road construction, development and logging in order to reduce the risk of wildfires. Rollins has also labeled the rule as an “absurd obstacle to properly managing our forests.”

Researchers out of Oregon State University explicitly cited the USDA’s wildfire-based claims for repealing the 2021 Roadless Rule as the reason behind why they analyzed four decades of fire research. Previous studies have highlighted the ecological benefits of roadless areas, including the conservation of biodiversity and supporting clean air and water quality, and the researchers argue those benefits are why it is important for decision-makers to critically evaluate proposed rationales for overturning the Roadless Rule.

Their study, published on Sept. 8, compiled fire severity and extent data to evaluate fire patterns across developed lands, inventoried roadless areas (IRAs), and wilderness. The fire severity data was sourced from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program, an interagency effort between the US Geological Survey and Forest Service that uses Landsat satellite imagery to map the extent and severity of all large fires from 1984 to the present.

The researchers found inventoried roadless areas burned at an estimated 1.13 times the annual rate of developed lands between 1984 and 2023. The annual burn rate of inventoried roadless areas dropped to 0.89 times the annual rate of developed lands when measured between 2014 and 2023.

“Our analysis indicates that IRAs across western states’ NFS land are not associated with a significantly greater rate of burning – or a greater rate of moderate and high-severity fire – relative to roaded or developed lands,” the researchers said in the study. “It is possible that burn rates in IRAs [inventoried roadless areas] are stabilizing as fires encounter previously burned areas with less fuel to burn. However, it is more likely that there is simply no consistent, quantifiable difference between patterns of fire in IRAs and the roaded and developed portion of the NFS landscape at the spatial and temporal scales we evaluated.”

The researchers did identify a landscape with a very high burn rate, but it would be unaffected by the Roadless Rule’s repeal. Congressionally designated wilderness areas burned at almost double the annual rate of inventoried roadless areas or developed lands, which they attributed to significant constraints on suppression resource availability during fire seasons and the low prioritization remote wilderness areas receive for both initial attack and containment.

Public comment on removing the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule has been extended to October 6, 2026. Go to this USDA page for more information and to Comment.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: End to landmark roadless rule will make wildfires more likely, study finds

Is the US Forest Service’s reorganization a ‘dismantling’ or a needed shift? Experts weigh in on wildland fire’s impact

The United States Department of Agriculture’s recent announcement to make sweeping structural changes to the nation’s Forest Service has brought confusion and uncertainty countrywide, ahead of what’s expected to be a very active wildfire year.

Numerous former Forest Service staff and communities have since shared their views on the announcement across multiple platforms, with some claiming the move is an effort to put more power into the hands of states, and others saying it’s an attempt to “dismantle” the entire agency. The reaction triggered the USFS to create a section of its webpage addressing “myths and facts” about the reorganization.

Kelly Martin, a decades-long fire veteran in the Forest Service and National Park Service, was initially sympathetic to the USDA’s alleged goal of moving more federal resources and support to the state level. Officials plan to transition the Forest Service to a state-based model in the western half of the nation, while maintaining the Service’s historical regional approach in the East. Leadership’s stated reason behind the move was to strengthen local partnerships and simplify the chain of command.

Martin, who is also a former president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, said states have long played a critical role in allocating scarce forestry resources for fire preparedness and response, and, on its face, this reorganization would ease that burden.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Forest Service to undergo ‘sweeping restructuring,’ close all regional offices

“In an ideal world, the states and federal agencies would all be working with and talking to each other, but no one is compelling us to have to work together,” Martin said. “This idea of pushing decision-making down to a collaborative process between the state and federal government, to me, makes sense.”

For that state-federal collaboration to actually work in practice, however, Martin said Forest Service directors would need to be required to work with state-based land management agencies to align the highest-priority projects. Officials have so far made no mention of such a requirement as part of the reorganization. Martin also said that while resources for preparedness and response have surged over the past few years, projects focused on land management and hazardous fuel reduction, which are critical to preventing future catastrophic wildfires, haven’t had nearly the same momentum, and nothing mentioned in the reorganization so far has addressed that disparity.

Research into wildland fire is also at risk of being severely impacted by the reorganization. Officials will close 57 of the Service’s 77 research stations across the country and consolidate them into a centralized office in Colorado. Numerous stations are located in university laboratories or at experimental forests where researchers analyze environmental changes over long periods of time, including wildfire risks and impact.

That move appears at odds with the current administration’s stated goal to focus on state needs, since a hyperlocal understanding of an environment’s relationship to fire is critical for understanding wildfire risk and prevention, according to former Forest Service researcher and current Tall Timbers Director of Fire Research Morgan Varner.

“Anytime we retreat from places where there’s a lot of wildfire or a lot of prescribed fire, which this plan does, you’re compromising our ability to conduct really relevant research,” Varner said. “That boots-on-the-ground has always been a unique aspect of Forest Service R&D … Local researchers are members of those communities, they know the managers in that area, they understand the challenges of people there, and how wildfires affect the economy, the loss of that relationship is the real cost of this.”

Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Chief Sarah Fisher claimed multiple times that the Forest Service reorganization would have no impact on current wildland firefighting resources, specifying that the current Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC) structure and reporting coordination with the National Interagency Fire Center would continue.

The loss of research that supports fire prevention and response appears to contradict Fisher’s claim.

“When USDA moved key offices to Kansas City during the first Trump administration, that 80% of their staff either retired, resigned or changed jobs,” Varner said. “That’s the hidden cost of the lab closures … When you try to move people around, many of them are just not going to go.”

Martin acknowledged the risk of public lands being sold off but also said seeing such speculative risks is easy in any major reorganization. What’s harder is to steer the reorganization in a way that benefits forests and addresses long-held issues in the agency. The current unknowns make forming any conclusions near impossible, she said.

“It’d be a real tragedy and a real shame if a ‘dismantling’ came to be,” Martin said. “There’s a lot of trust that still needs to be rebuilt … and I think there are innovative and novel ways to address the problems that face our forests today.”

Fire funding up nearly 25 percent in President’s 2024 budget

Federal wildland fire funding may increase by nearly 25 percent in 2024 if President Biden’s budget priorities are adopted by Congress. The budget, released March 9, reflects firefighters’ concerns and a rising political commitment to face increasingly complex wildfire conditions.

Initiatives include a long-term fix for wildland firefighter pay equity, an 8 percent increase in the number of federal and Tribal firefighters, and expansion of prior commitments to interagency response and research, fuels management, aviation and remote sensing initiatives, and community-based prevention programs.

TOMB White House Budget Fact Sheet 2023-03-09he summary fact sheet released by the Office of Management and Budget has a single mention of wildfires, woven into a $24 billion investment to “build communities’ resilience to floods, wildfires, storms, extreme heat, and drought brought on by climate change.”

Wildfire and wildland fire management funding in the 2024 budget appear in joint and specific releases by the lead agencies with federal wildland fire management responsibilities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposes a 28 percent increase and the Department of the Interior proposes a 21 percent increase over 2023 funding.

News releases from both departments note the priority for funding the proposed raises in base pay for federal and tribal firefighters. The budget summary notes that funding will pay for fuels as well as fire management. The proposal calls for “More than $4.2 billion for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior wildland fire and hazardous fuels management” that will “implement comprehensive workforce reform, including increased firefighter pay, additional firefighting capacity, enhanced mental and physical health support, and improved housing options for firefighters.”

As detailed in a March 9 USDA release, “The budget includes increases of $180 million for USDA and $72 million for DOI to raise base pay for Federal and Tribal wildland firefighters, with additional premium pay costs covered out of funding requested for suppression operations.” The USFS Explanatory Notes page for the 2024 budget includes additional details and annual performance indicators. One indicator of note for 2022: on page 233, it’s reported that nearly 3 million acres of fuels treatments were accomplished, with 57 percent using prescribed fire despite a prescribed fire pause (followed by the release of the National Prescribed Fire Program Review) put in place after prescribed fire escapes in New Mexico. The 2024 budget increases hazardous fuels targets to 4 million acres.

The DOI release expands on the appropriations request: “The President’s 2024 Budget proposes legislation and funding to implement significant reforms to increase the Nation’s investment in the wildland fire management workforce. The cornerstone of these long-term reforms is a permanent increase in pay. The Administration proposes legislation to establish a special base rate salary table for wildland firefighters, create a new premium pay category that provides some additional compensation for all hours a wildland fire responder is mobilized on an incident, and establish a streamlined pay cap that provides waiver authority to the Secretary using specific criteria.”

The pay-raise focus has garnered support from the National Federation of Federal Employees. In a March 13 release, NFFE President Randy Erwin praises President Biden for “taking this critical step in addressing the wildfire crisis and improving the lives of federal wildland firefighters across the country.”

Erwin noted that pay reforms will “help recruit and retain skilled personnel … While there is still much work to do to ensure our wildland firefighting workforce has the resources to be sustainable in the coming years, I am proud that our members are seeing results from their advocacy.”

Approval of the budget faces the challenge of a divided Congress. A Republican-majority House may push back against the overall budget, resulting in a flat-lined continuing resolution in place of an approved 2024 budget. Additionally, implementation may be shaped by legislation that may result from reports and recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. The commission’s final call for recommendations from the public (including firefighters) closes on March 22.

Report: US Forest Service is sometimes overstating fuel management accomplishments

Forest thinning in the Umpqua National Forest
Forest thinning project in the Umpqua National Forest. Credit, Oregon State University.

NBC News conducted an investigation into some of the claims and statistics about vegetation management projects that are designed to improve forest health and/or and reduce the threat of wildfires. The emphasis of the very lengthy article about their findings was not so much to question the need or effectiveness of the hazardous fuel reduction projects, but to examine their claims of accomplishments, which are sometimes misleading.

Many fuel management projects on National Forests include multiple treatments of a single area. There can be some combination of thinning, pruning, piling, chipping, or prescribed burning, all considered independently and occurring at different times. In an extreme scenario, if the project was 100 acres and five different treatments occurred, each might be reported as accomplishing 100 acres of fuel treatment. They then tell Congress they treated 500 acres.

The NBC article gave an actual example of a project on the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California near Big Bear Lake. The 173-acre project had multiple treatments. From the article:

They first [step] appeared in 2016, when the Forest Service assigned workers to cut trees to reduce the area’s density. The agency came back two years later, pruning the remaining trees and piling the cut wood across the full 173 acres, then chipping 52 acres of it. A few months later, workers burned 18 acres of the piles.

The pruning, piling, chipping and burning were entered as separate items in the database and the agency reported them as 416 acres of treated land in its 2019 fiscal year totals to Congress. In summer 2021, it burned the remaining 155 acres of piles, reporting them in that year’s totals.

The Forest Service’s efforts ultimately reduced fire risk on 173 acres of land, but they were reported to Congress as 744 acres over four fiscal years.

“These acres are reported six times because we must request funding to accomplish the full suite of activities on the same 173 acres,” said [Wade] Muehlhof, the service’s spokesperson. “Each of these activities needs to be planned and budgeted for annually.”

The Forest Service tells Congress that it reduces wildfire risk on more than 2.5 million acres of its land every year. But this process of recounting the same acres any time more than one type of work is completed means that far less land is protected from damaging fire than is being reported.

NBC estimates that nationwide the FS has overstated accomplishments by 2.5 million acres, or 17 percent. In California the numbers are higher, 27 percent in the past five years, and by roughly 35 percent in the places near the most people, the state’s wildland urban interface areas.

The NBC article was written by Adiel Kaplan, with assistance from Monica Hersher and Joe Murphy.