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.

Save communities by thinning forests or hardening structures?

Moose Fire August 2, 2022 in Montana
The result of aerial ignition on the Moose Fire August 2, 2022 in Idaho. By Mike McMillan for the USFS.

Bloomberg Law has an interesting article by Bobby Magill about efforts to reduce the wildfire threat to homes. It discusses and compares forest thinning vs. hardening structures. Here are excerpts, but read the entire article.

Congress is spending billions to save communities from Western megafires by thinning large swaths of forests even as scientists say climate change-driven drought and heat are too extreme for it to work.

The money would be better spent thinning woods closest to homes and shoring up houses against embers raining down from firestorms, according to academics, former agency officials, and others who study wildfires.

“If our goal is to keep homes and communities from burning, the experts are telling us to focus from the home outwards. First, harden the home so it is less likely to ignite,” said Beverly Law, an emeritus professor of forestry at Oregon State University.

Megafires are sustained by drought and heat, and “no amount of thinning treatment will prevent such fires from occurring,” she said.

[…]

No Scientific Consensus
As the federal government focuses on forest thinning, no scientific consensus exists that removing vegetation, especially at a landscape-scale, will save communities in the paths of firestorms amid the West’s historic 23-year drought.

The science is clear that “there isn’t a great connection between home loss and these fuel treatments,” though they sometimes help firefighters gain a foothold on some fires, Cheng said.

Randy Moore, the Forest Service chief, said the agency is confident that as homes are built deeper and deeper into the woods, its research shows that removing “overstocked” trees is the best way to protect them.

“We know where we do nothing, or where we do a little, we’re seeing the evidence out on the landscape,” Moore said, referring to recent megafires. “We feel compelled to do something.”

California agencies intend to ramp up prescribed burning

Whaley prescribed fire, Black Hills National Forest
Whaley prescribed fire, Black Hills National Forest, January 13, 2016. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

A group of state and federal land management agencies in California has established a plan to promote the use of “beneficial fire”, and by 2025 expect to treat up to 400,000 acres a year.

That is well short of the agreement the same agencies reached in 2018 to treat one million acres per year by 2025. In August, 2020 they recommitted to that same one million-acre target. The plan released last week restates the one-million goal on page 17, but on the following page says, “By 2025, land managers will seek to deploy beneficial fire on 400,000 acres annually, based on the following targets and estimates:”

Targets, California prescribed fire and cultural burning
Targets, California prescribed fire and cultural burning. From the report on page. 18

The numbers above total 300,000 prescribed/cultural acres each year plus 120,000 to 200,000 acres of fire managed for resource benefit.

Beneficial fire, a term not widely used, is defined in the document as including prescribed fire, fire managed for resource benefit (less than full suppression of unplanned ignitions), and cultural burning by California Native American tribes.

Between 2017 and 2020, CAL FIRE and the US Forest Service completed or assisted with prescribed fire activities on approximately 80,000 acres annually, according to the plan released by the agencies last week. In the same period tribes, California State Parks, the National Park Service, local agencies, and private entities completed burns on tens of thousands of additional acres annually. The USFS and NPS also completed approximately 20,000 acres each year of fire managed for resource benefit. The amount of land thinned or converted into fuel breaks but not burned would add to that figure.

Doing some back of the envelope ciphering, let’s assume that during that four-year period about 120,000 acres were prescribed burned each year. Current estimates indicate that between 10 million and 30 million acres in California need some form of fuel reduction treatment. To use a middle ground number, if 20 million acres need to be treated on an average fire return interval of 20 years, for example, that works out to one million acres that need to be treated each year, about eight times the area treated every year recently. The actual average fire return interval should probably be less, especially considering that neglected areas will need both an initial entry burn and at least one subsequent burn before they can be restored to a sustainable fire regime and obtain maintenance status.

Norbeck prescribed fire
A member of the Alpine Hotshots ignites the Norbeck prescribed fire, October 20, 2014 in Custer State Park, SD. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

The plan released last week by the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force indicates that the state of California will begin managing some fires for resource benefit, major change in their policy. They will evaluate areas on state land where modified fire suppression strategies can be implemented, such as land trusts, ranches, and timber owners. Where appropriate and authorized by the state Legislature, CAL FIRE will use plans and agreements with land managers and landowners in order to allow unintentional ignitions to burn under predetermined and prescribed conditions, to accomplish resource benefits similar to prescribed fire.

The key elements of the plan include:

  • Launching an online prescribed fire permitting system to streamline the review and approval of prescribed fire projects;
  • Establishing the state’s new Prescribed Fire Claims Fund to reduce liability for private burners;
  • Beginning a statewide program to enable tribes and cultural fire practitioners to revitalize cultural burning practices;
  • A prescribed fire training center to grow, train, and diversify the state’s prescribed fire workforce;
  • An interagency beneficial fire tracking system;
  • Pilot projects to undertake larger landscape-scale burns; and
  • A comprehensive review of the state’s smoke management programs to facilitate prescribed fire while protecting public health.

“This plan is vital to improve the health and resilience of the state’s forests, reduce wildfire risk of vulnerable communities, and increase stewardship by Native American fire practitioners,” said Task Force Co-Chair and U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Jennifer Eberlien.

The plan, California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the use of Beneficial Fire, March 2022, was developed by the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. It can be downloaded here: (large 17 MB file).

Yes, properly executed fuels treatments can modify a wildfire’s behavior and reduce intensity

Victoria Prescribed Fire, Black Hills National Forest
Victoria Prescribed Fire, Black Hills National Forest. South Dakota. USFS photo by Matt Daigle. March, 2021.

In recent weeks there have been discussions online about whether or not fuel reduction projects can aid firefighters by reducing the intensity of wildfires. These rumblings are heard from agenda driven advocacy groups including the John Muir Project.

There is no question that properly executed and followed up fuels treatments — mechanical, or prescribed fires — can modify subsequent fire behavior and reduce a wildfire’s intensity. Despite the attention getting efforts of these groups, this has been a settled issue for a very, very long time. Indigenous people no doubt knew this, and in recent decades wildland firefighters do as well.

From an Associated Press article by Don Thompson:

Scientists say climate change has made the American West much warmer and drier and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, accelerating the need for more large-scale forest treatments.

Critics say forest thinning operations are essentially logging projects in disguise.

Opening up the forest canopy and leaving more distance between trees reduces the natural humidity and cooling shade of dense forests and allows unimpeded winds to push fire faster, said Chad Hanson, forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project.

Such reasoning defies the laws of physics, said other experts: Less fuel means less severe fire. Fewer trees means it’s more difficult for fires to leap from treetop to treetop.

In a tweet that linked to the Associated Press article, British Columbia-based fire ecologist Robert W. Gray wrote:

Another case of false equivalency: weight of published, peer-reviewed fact vs one or two counter factuals published in a single journal known for pushing pseudoscience.

During extreme weather and fuel conditions, such as strong winds and very low fuel moisture, fires can spread very quickly with a great deal of resistance to control igniting spot fires a mile ahead, and in some cases may burn rapidly through or jump across fuel reduction sites, possibly igniting structures. This can illustrate the importance of homeowners making structures fire resistant and reducing flammable material in the Home Ignition Zone.

But in less than extreme conditions, a fire that spreads into a recently completed fuels project will slow, be less intense, and will offer less resistance to control. A recent example of this was when the Caldor Fire in Northern California began to reach the South Lake Tahoe area, allowing firefighters to attack the fire more directly. In a live briefing on September 3, 2021 East Side Incident Commander Rocky Opliger complimented the agencies for the fuel treatments that had been accomplished over the years. He said the 150-foot flame lengths dropped to about 15-feet when the fire entered the treated areas. This allowed hand crews and engines to take an aggressive approach to suppress the fire and prevent structure loss. The video of the briefing is on Facebook; Mr. Oplinger’s comments about the fuel treatments begin at 34:10.

“Science” funded by agenda driven advocacy groups that has not been peer-reviewed should always be suspect. Settled science that has been proven for decades or even centuries, should be respected.

Examining how fuel treatments affected suppression of the Caldor Fire in California

Backfire illustration
Illustration of ignition of a backfire, from the US Forest Service video below.

The U.S. Forest Service has released a video — the second in the Forest News: California National Forests series. In this episode the agency examines how fuel treatment areas on National Forest System lands changed the intensity of the Caldor Fire and provided opportunities for community defense. The blaze burned more than 221,000 acres near South Lake Tahoe in August and September.

The video was written, directed, and narrated by Joe Flannery, the Acting Regional Fire Communications Team Lead in the Forest Service’s California region.