Fire Suppression Expenditures Research Articles

Human and climatic influences on wildfires ignited by recreational activities in national forests in Washington, Oregon, and California * *This project was funded through Joint Fire Science Program award #21–2–01–1.

In Washington, Oregon, and California, ignitions from recreational activities accounted for 12% of human-caused wildfires, and 8% of the area burned, from 1992–2020. Wildfires ignited by recreational activities not only increase fire suppression expenditures but have the potential to limit recreational activities traditionally associated with use of fire, such as camping. From 1992–2020, 50% of recreation-caused ignitions in these three states occurred on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The mean annual number of recreation-caused ignitions on national forests in the three states during this period was relatively stable, about 500, whereas recreation-caused ignitions within other jurisdictions decreased by 40%. Improved understanding of the impact of human and climatic factors on recreation-caused ignitions could provide valuable insights for shaping policy and management decisions. We found that mean annual densities of recreation-caused ignitions on national forests were 7 times greater within 1 km of designated campgrounds than >1 km from campgrounds, although 80% of recreation-caused ignitions occured >1 km from designated campgrounds. Ignition density in campgrounds increased non-linearly with overnight visitor density; a doubling of visitor density was associated with a ∼40% increase in ignitions. Large (≥4 ha) recreation-caused wildfires, especially those ignited in designated campgrounds, tended to occur concurrent with drought and 1–2 years after anomalously wet conditions. These results suggest that accounting for drought in implementation of fire restrictions, and targeting wildfire-prevention awareness to recreational users outside designated campgrounds, might reduce the likelihood of recreation-caused ignitions.

Modeling Individual Extended Attack Wildfire Suppression Expenditures in British Columbia

AbstractWe developed models of suppression expenditures for individual extended attack fires in British Columbia using parametric and nonparametric machine-learning (ML) methods. Our models revealed that suppression expenditures were significantly affected by a fire’s size, proximity to the wildland–urban interface (WUI) and populated places, a weather based fire severity index, and the amount of coniferous forest cover. We also found that inflation-adjusted individual fire suppression expenditures have increased over the 1981 to 2014 study period. The ML and parametric models had similar predictive performance: the ML models had somewhat lower root mean squared errors but not on mean average errors. Better specification of fire priority as well as resource constraints might improve future model performance.

Historical and future global burned area with changing climate and human demography

Summary Wildfires influence terrestrial carbon cycling and represent a safety risk, and yet a process-based understanding of their frequency and spatial distributions remains elusive. We combine satellite-based observations with an enhanced dynamic global vegetation model to make regionally resolved global assessments of burned area (BA) responses to changing climate, derived from 34 Earth system models and human demographics for 1860–2100. Limited by climate and socioeconomics, recent BA has decreased, especially in central South America and mesic African savannas. However, future simulations predict increasing BA due to changing climate, rapid population density growth, and urbanization. BA increases are especially notable at high latitudes, due to accelerated warming, and over the tropics and subtropics, due to drying and human ignitions. Conversely, rapid urbanization also limits BA via enhanced fire suppression in the immediate vicinity of settlements, offsetting the potential for dramatic future increases, depending on warming extent. Our analysis provides further insight into regional and global BA trends, highlighting the importance of including human demographic change in models for wildfire under changing climate.

Prior wildfires influence burn severity of subsequent large fires

With longer and more severe fire seasons predicted, the incidence and extent of fires are expected to increase in western North America. As more area is burned, past wildfires may influence the spread and burn severity of subsequent fires, with implications for ecosystem resilience and fire management. We examined how previous burn severity, topography, vegetation, and weather influenced burn severity on four wildfires, two in Idaho, one in Washington, and one in British Columbia. These were large fire events, together burning 330 000 ha and cost $165 million USD in fire suppression expenditures. Collectively, these four study fires reburned over 50 000 ha previously burned between 1984 and 2006. We used sequential autoregression to analyze how past fires, topography, vegetation, and weather influenced burn severity. We found that areas burned in the last three decades, at any severity, had significantly lower severity in the subsequent fire. Final models included maximum temperature, vegetation cover typ...

The Impact of Residential Development Pattern on Wildland Fire Suppression Expenditures

Despite a growing body of literature on the economics of wildland fire suppression, the effect of development pattern in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has received only cursory treatment. We model the relationship between fire suppression expenditures and the spatial pattern of residential development using data from 281 fires in the northern Rocky Mountains. We find that the effect of WUI development on suppression expenditures is dependent on the spatial pattern of development. Our results suggest that policies to control the spatial pattern of WUI development can be nearly as effective as policies that completely restrict WUI development.

Scofield, Anna. “The Impacts of Residential Development Pattern on Wildland Fire Suppression Expenditures.” MS Thesis, University of Wyoming. Outstanding Master's Thesis

Scofield, Anna. “The Impacts of Residential Development Pattern on Wildland Fire Suppression Expenditures.” MS Thesis, University of Wyoming. Outstanding Master's Thesis

Climate change presents increased potential for very large fires in the contiguous United States

Very large fires (VLFs) have important implications for communities, ecosystems, air quality and fire suppression expenditures. VLFs over the contiguous US have been strongly linked with meteorological and climatological variability. Building on prior modelling of VLFs (>5000 ha), an ensemble of 17 global climate models were statistically downscaled over the US for climate experiments covering the historic and mid-21st-century periods to estimate potential changes in VLF occurrence arising from anthropogenic climate change. Increased VLF potential was projected across most historically fire-prone regions, with the largest absolute increase in the intermountain West and Northern California. Complementary to modelled increases in VLF potential were changes in the seasonality of atmospheric conditions conducive to VLFs, including an earlier onset across the southern US and more symmetric seasonal extension in the northern regions. These projections provide insights into regional and seasonal distribution of VLF potential under a changing climate, and serve as a basis for future strategic and tactical fire management options.

The economic benefit of localised, short-term, wildfire-potential information

Wildfire-potential information products are designed to support decisions for prefire staging of movable wildfire suppression resources across geographic locations. We quantify the economic value of these information products by defining their value as the difference between two cases of expected fire-suppression expenditures: one in which daily information about spatial variation in wildfire-potential is used to move fire suppression resources throughout the season, and the other case in which daily information is not used and fire-suppression resources are staged in their home locations all season. We demonstrate the method by constructing a hypothetical wildland management unit calibrated to represent a region typical in the US West. The method uses estimated suppression costs and probabilities of significant fire, as provided by an information service, to estimate expected suppression costs. We analyse differences in expected suppression costs for a range of risk scenarios. Economic savings occur for the majority of risk scenarios. This approach can be used to evaluate investments in wildfire-potential information services, and for assessing the value of investing in new resources.

Quantifying the Potential Impacts of Fuel Treatments on Wildfire Suppression Costs

Modeling the impacts and effects of hazardous fuel reduction treatments is a pressing issue within the wildfire management community. Prospective evaluation of fuel treatment effectiveness allows for comparison of alternative treatment strategies in terms of socioeconomic and ecological impacts and facilitates analysis of tradeoffs across land-management objectives. Studies have yet to rigorously examine potential impacts to fire suppression expenditures associated with prior hazardous fuel reduction treatments. Such information would be helpful for federal land-management agencies struggling to contain escalating wildfire management costs. In this article we establish a methodology for estimating potential reductions in wildfire suppression costs. Our approach pairs wildfire simulation outputs with a regression cost model and quantifies the influence of fuel treatments on distributions of wildfire sizes and suppression costs. Our case study focuses on a landscape within the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon that was selected to receive funding under the auspices of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. Results suggest substantial reductions in distributions of wildfire size and suppression cost on a per fire basis. Furthermore, because fewer ignitions become large fires on the treated landscape, distributions of annual area burned and annual suppression costs also shift downward because of fuel treatments. Results are contingent on four key factors: large-scale implementation of fuel treatments across the landscape, assumed treatment effectiveness over the duration of the analysis period, accuracy of wildfire and cost models, and accuracy of projected changes to fire behavior fuel models resulting from fuel treatments. We discuss strengths and limitations of the modeling approach and offer suggestions for future improvements and applications.

Corrigendum to: Factors influencing large wildland fire suppression expenditures

There is an urgent and immediate need to address the excessive cost of large fires. Here, we studied large wildland fire suppression expenditures by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Among 16 potential non-managerial factors, which represented fire size and shape, private properties, public land attributes, forest and fuel conditions, and geographic settings, we found only fire size and private land had a strong effect on suppression expenditures. When both were accounted for, all the other variables had no significant effect. A parsimonious model to predict suppression expenditures was suggested, in which fire size and private land explained 58% of variation in expenditures. Other things being equal, suppression expenditures monotonically increased with fire size. For the average fire size, expenditures first increased with the percentage of private land within burned area, but as the percentage exceeded 20%, expenditures slowly declined until they stabilised when private land reached 50% of burned area. The results suggested that efforts to contain federal suppression expenditures need to focus on the highly complex, politically sensitive topic of wildfires on private land.

The association between Northern Hemisphere climate patterns and interannual variability in Canadian wildfire activity

Wildfire impacts on ecological and socioeconomic systems are regulated, in part, by climate. Association between hemispheric-scale climate patterns and annual wildfire activity can be obscured by local factors that also control the initiation and spread of fires. Vegetation, topography, and fire suppression can be expected to influence conventional measures of annual wildfire activity such as area burned, effectively concealing evidence of broad-scale climate influences. This study investigates alternatives to area-burned statistics for quantifying annual wildfire activity in Canada in relation to Northern Hemisphere climate variability represented by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). We depart from conventional approaches by including socioeconomic measures of wildfire activity and by assessing spatially referenced wildfire data over units of observation chosen explicitly to diminish variability caused by factors unrelated to broad-scale climate. Our data-centred approach, combined with linear regression modelling, revealed that the AMO was positively correlated with national time series of very large fires (≥10 000 ha), wildfire-related evacuations, and fire suppression expenditures over the period 1975–2007. The AMO and wildfire activity were most closely coupled during a period of predominantly positive-phase Arctic Oscillation (AO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) between 1989 and 2001. Positive correlation between maximum evacuation wind speed and the AMO suggests that wind may be a causal factor in the AMO–wildfire relationship.

External Human Factors in Incident Management Team Decisionmaking and Their Effect on Large Fire Suppression Expenditures

Abstract Large wildland fires are complex, costly events influenced by a vast array of physical, climatic, and social factors. Changing climate, fuel buildup due to past suppression, and increasing populations in the wildland-urban interface have all been blamed for the extreme fire seasons and rising suppression expenditures of recent years. With each high-cost year comes a multitude of fire cost reviews, suppression cost studies by federal oversight agencies, and new rules and regulations focused on containing or reducing suppression costs. However, largely ignored in many of these inquiries are the human factors and pressures outside (external to) the influence of the incident team managing a fire that are contributing to the problem. This article presents an in-depth examination of some external human factors that affect incident management team (IMT) decisionmaking and influence suppression costs. Data were collected during 2004 and 2005 through 48 in-depth interviews with IMT command and general staff members representative of each Geographic Area Coordination Center, all federal agencies, and many state agencies whose employees serve on teams. External human factors identified include risk management; interaction with agency administrators; policies, regulations, and rules; resource availability; and social-political pressure. Inattention to these factors can result in policies that adversely affect IMTs charged with managing highly volatile events in a safe, timely, and cost-efficient manner.

Factors influencing large wildland fire suppression expenditures

There is an urgent and immediate need to address the excessive cost of large fires. Here, we studied large wildland fire suppression expenditures by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Among 16 potential non-managerial factors, which represented fire size and shape, private properties, public land attributes, forest and fuel conditions, and geographic settings, we found only fire size and private land had a strong effect on suppression expenditures. When both were accounted for, all the other variables had no significant effect. A parsimonious model to predict suppression expenditures was suggested, in which fire size and private land explained 58% of variation in expenditures. Other things being equal, suppression expenditures monotonically increased with fire size. For the average fire size, expenditures first increased with the percentage of private land within burned area, but as the percentage exceeded 20%, expenditures slowly declined until they stabilised when private land reached 50% of burned area. The results suggested that efforts to contain federal suppression expenditures need to focus on the highly complex, politically sensitive topic of wildfires on private land.

Estimating Suppression Expenditures for Individual Large Wildland Fires

Abstract The extreme cost of fighting wildland fires has brought fire suppression expenditures to the forefront of budgetary and policy debate in the United States. Inasmuch as large fires are responsible for the bulk of fire suppression expenditures, understanding fire characteristics that influence expenditures is important for both strategic fire planning and onsite fire management decisions. These characteristics then can be used to produce estimates of suppression expenditures for large wildland fires for use in wildland fire decision support or after-fire reviews. The primary objective of this research was to develop regression models that could be used to estimate expenditures on large wildland fires based on area burned, variables representing the fire environment, values at risk, resource availability, detection time, and National Forest System region. Variables having the largest influence on cost included fire intensity level, area burned, and total housing value within 20 mi of ignition. These equations were then used to predict suppression expenditures on a set of fiscal year 2005 Forest Service fires for the purpose of detecting “extreme” cost fires—those fires falling more than 1 or 2 SDs above or below their expected value.

Forest Service Large Fire Area Burned and Suppression Expenditure Trends, 1970–2002

Extreme fire seasons in recent years and associated high suppression expenditures have brought about a chorus of calls for reform of federal firefighting structure and policy. Given the political nature of the topic, a critical review of past trends in area burned, size of fires, and suppression expenditures is warranted. We examined data relating to emergency wildland fire suppression expenditures, number of fires, and acres burned and developed statistical models to estimate area burned using drought indices for the USDA Forest Service from 1970-2002.