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A century of fire suppression has increased fuels, contributing to our current, problematic fire patterns. Fire suppression also left us with little knowledge of the past fires that ecosystems and Indigenous societies co-existed with for millennia. Science on pre-1900 fire regimes and forest structure is a key foundation of current fuels and wildfire management programs used to combat the wildfire crisis; tree rings are a key source of this information.

FORT fire history research out of the New Mexico Landscapes Field Station 1) has improved and made possible tens of thousands of acres of fuels and wildfire hazard reduction treatments, and 2) is the foundation of Fire Management Plans and Forest Management Plans for the U.S. Forest Service Santa Fe and Carson National Forest, Bandelier and Valles Caldera National Park Service units, and the BLM Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. FORT fire science-informed fuels treatments were successful at stopping the 2020 En Medio Fire from burning Santa Fe, NM and the forested water supply, which translates into more than $1 billion in estimated avoided costs. 

Local fire and forest histories directly inform local management projects (for example, thinning tree density targets and prescribed fire frequencies) across northern New Mexico, and new regional and national-level fire history research (from the new North American Tree-Ring Fire-Scar Network) informs management at broader scales.   

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