A key question for many areas of the US West is whether they are adapting to become more or less resilient to future wildfire. It is clear that while fuels treatments are being successfully implemented in some areas, fuels continue to build up in others, and new WUI development is putting more homes at risk. Maintaining fuels treatments over time also takes substantial ongoing investment of time and resources.
We are using a combination of existing datasets and remote sensing to assess annual fuels treatment applications in the Deschutes focal study area from 2010 to 2019. For public lands, we have acquired LANDFIRE annual disturbance maps, while for private lands we are using maps generated from the Oregon Department of Forestry FERNS reporting system. We are vetting each source against aerial photos and satellite imagery to verify their accuracy and refine the maps as needed.
Once these treatment maps are complete, we will incorporate them into the Envision modeling system, including annual updates to fuels and vegetation succession across the entire study area using Envision’s Dynamic Veg submodel. We will then subject each year’s landscape to a range of comparable ignitions and fire weather to test whether the landscape is adapting to become more or less vulnerable to wildfire losses of vegetation and homes, and to spatialize and quantify factors that make a landscape more (or less) resilient to increasing wildfire.