WildfiresNew Wildfire Reality: Helping Land Managers Take Risk-Analysis Approach

New digital tools developed by Oregon State University will enable land managers to better adapt to the new reality of large wildfires through analytics that guide planning and suppression across jurisdictional boundaries that fires typically don’t adhere to.

Led by Chris Dunn, a research associate in the OSU College of Forestry with several years of firefighting experience, scientists have used machine learning algorithms and risk-analysis science to analyze the many factors involved in handling fires: land management objectives, firefighting decisions, fire mitigation opportunities and the needs of communities, the environment and the fire management system.

Their findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

“We have to learn to live with fire,” Dunn said. “There is no forecast or evidence of a future without more fire. If we accept that view, then the question becomes, what kind of fire do we want?”

Now, Dunn notes, “we suppress 97 or 98 percent of fires such that we experience the 2 or 3% that are really bad, where we have no chance of successful suppression because they’re just so explosive.”

But those numbers over time can be inverted, he says.

“We can choose to have more beneficial fires whose impacts aren’t as consequential and less of those really bad ones, eventually,” Dunn said. “It could ultimately mean more fire, but more of the right kind of fire in the right places for the right reasons.”

Using fire-prone landscapes of the Pacific Northwest as their study areas, Dunn and collaborators developed a trio of complementary, risk-based analytics tools – quantitative wildfire risk assessment, mapping of suppression difficulty, and atlases of locations where fires might be controlled.

“These tools can be a foundation for adapting fire management to this new reality,” Dunn said. “They integrate fire risk with fire management difficulties and opportunities, which makes for a more complete picture of the fire management landscape.”

That picture makes possible a risk-based planning structure that allows for preplanning responses to wildfires, responses that balance risk with the likelihood of success.

The landscapes used in the study are “multijurisdictional” – i.e., a mix of federal, state and private property – which highlights the shared responsibility of wildfire risk mitigation, Dunn said.

“We’re a couple decades into having really large wildfires here in the American West,” he said. “Fires today are bigger, faster and more intense – we’re really in a new fire reality. We see this issue globally, like the intense fires currently burning in Australia.