In recent decades, wildfires have increased in size and intensity, and the fire season has lengthened. This and other factors have increased wildfire suppression costs and risks to human health and safety. Economists in the Social and Economic Analysis Branch (SEA) at FORT investigate numerous aspects of wildland fire, its impacts, and how to mitigate the risk wildfire poses to people, resources, and property.
Wildfire Risk Mitigation
Wildfire risk mitigation refers to actions taken before a fire to reduce the potential negative effects to people and property. The Wildfire Research Team analyzes community-specific social and risk assessment data to learn how residents of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) understand and interact with their wildfire risk.
Wildfire Risk Assessment
Wildfire risk assessment provides information that can support decision-making across the spectrum of wildfire management, including for ignition prevention, fuels management, and other mitigation actions. However, common tools for wildfire risk assessment were developed decades ago and have not kept up with recent technological and methodological developments. FORT scientists are collaborating with personnel from other USGS Science Centers on a suite of projects that will develop, demonstrate, and help disseminate innovative approaches to wildfire risk assessment. These projects, funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Defense (DoD) Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), and others, focus on identifying and representing the risks that wildfire presents to values important to agency partners, such as cultural or tribal values or DoD mission-critical land uses. Our new approach to wildfire risk assessment seeks to leverage state-of-the-art models and science on the biological and physical effects of fire as well as economic and other social science tools for representing how these effects translate into costs and changes in values.
Landscape-Level Fuel Treatments
Landscape-level fuel treatments can reduce fuel loads and decrease the likelihood of extreme or catastrophic fire behavior. They also can support source water protection, maintain recreational access to wildland areas, and provide ecological benefits. As part of the Sustaining Environmental Capital Initiative (SECI), SEA is investigating the public’s preferences for these different outcomes to provide information on benefits and tradeoffs for managers selecting locations for landscape-level fuel treatments in northern New Mexico.
Costs of Wildfire-Damaged Ecosystems
Large, high-intensity wildland fire can damage natural resources and lead to the loss of ecosystem services (for example, wildlife habitat, watershed conditions, recreational and aesthetic value); however, calculating these damages is complex and could be conducted in multiple ways. SEA is investigating approaches to estimate the value of these damages for large fires in sagebrush ecosystems.
Post-Fire Hazards and Ecological Restoration
To protect against further resource damage, some large fires require post-fire treatments such as seeding, hazard tree removal, and stream re-vegetation. As part of broader efforts to understand Economic Impacts of Ecological Restoration, SEA economists study how the spending on post-fire treatments in the Western U.S. supports local jobs and business activities. SEA economists also contribute to understanding post-fire hazards and their impacts to people as part of a broader, multidisciplinary project across numerous USGS science centers (see Identifying Chains of Consequences and Interventions for Post-fire Hazards and Impacts to Resources and Ecosystems).
Economics of Managing Invasive Annual Grasses
Invasive annual grasses like buffelgrass and cheatgrass create novel fire risks and transform natural ecosystems. SEA economists collaborate with FORT ecologists and Colorado State University to develop state-and-transition models to improve the efficiency of managing this novel source of fire risk and to measure the costs of invasive annual grass management.
