U.S.federal fire and forest policy: emphasizing resilience in dry forests

Abstract

Citation: Stephens, S. L., B. M. Collins, E. Biber, and P. Z. Fulé. 2016. U.S. federal fire and forest policy: emphasizing resilience in dry forests. Ecosphere 7(11):Abstract. Current U.S. forest fire policy emphasizes short-term outcomes versus long-term goals. This perspective drives managers to focus on the protection of high-valued resources, whether ecosystem-based or developed infrastructure, at the expense of forest resilience. Given these current and future challenges posed by wildland fire and because the U.S. Forest Service spent >50% of its budget on fire suppression in 2015, a review and reexamination of existing policy is warranted. One of the most difficult challenges to revising forest fire policy is that agency organizations and decision making processes are not structured in ways to ensure that fire management is thoroughly considered in management decisions. Current resource-specific policies are so focused on individual concerns that they may be missing the fact that there are "endangered landscapes" that are threatened by changing climate and fire. We propose that forest restoration should be at least equal to other land management priorities because large-scale restoration is necessary for the sake of forest ecosystem integrity now and into the future. Another proposal is to switch the "default" rule in federal planning documents that currently have to "justify" managed wildland fire; instead, U.S. federal agencies should be required to disclose the long-term ecological impacts of continued fire suppression. Proposed legislation that identifies the most expensive 2% of wildfires annually to be funded from emergency funding instead of by the federal land management agencies. If increases in forest restoration fail to accompany the change in how large wildfires are funded, then U.S. fire suppression costs will remain high while resilience will continue to decline. Expansion of the wildland-urban interface will continue to drive suppression costs higher; new federal partnerships with States and local governments are needed to address this problem. Given the legacy of fire suppression and a future of climate change, management for other values in forests will be, in the long run, futile without also managing for long-term forest resilience.

Analog‐based fire regime and vegetation shifts in mountainous regions of the western US

“…Although the human influence on fire regimes confounds nearly every study involving fire, vegetation, and climate, even those using contemporary fire data (Parisien et al ), our results are highly relevant to land managers who aim to restore fire as a natural process (Hessburg et al , Stephens et al ). This is particularly relevant to protected areas where natural processes such as fire are not suppressed (van Wagtendonk , Miller and Aplet ) and where the fire‐climate relationships are typically stronger (Archibald et al , Parks et al ).…”

Modeling Fuel Treatment Leverage: Encounter Rates, Risk Reduction, and Suppression Cost Impacts

“…The joint impacts of population growth and expanded ex-urban development will likely result in more human-caused ignitions along with more homes and communities exposed to fire [4][5][6][7][8][9]. In certain fire-prone ecosystems, these challenges are compounded by legacy effects of decades of fire exclusion rendering forest conditions more conducive to extreme fire behavior that is resistant to control and can degrade forest health [10][11][12]. Given a likely future of increasing costs and losses, the need to develop more cost-effective and sustainable approaches to managing wildland fire is apparent [13][14][15][16].…”

Towards enhanced risk management: planning, decision making and monitoring of US wildfire response

“…Maintaining socialecological resilience to the rapidly changing fire environment will require adaptation of policies (Stephens et al 2016), social perspectives and expectations (Moritz et al 2014;Schoennagel et al 2017), ecosystems (Stephens et al 2013;North et al 2015), and the behaviour of the fire management system itself (Thompson et al 2015). This special issue focuses on the latter, based on the premise that how fires are managed is a key determinant of the resiliency of the broader social-ecological system.…”