This webinar highlighted results from a study on the effects of fuel treatments and previously burned areas on subsequent fire management costs. Presenter Kevin Barnett and his colleagues, Helen Naughton, Sean Parks, and Carol Miller, built models explaining variation in daily fire management costs that captured the influences of weather, topography, human populations-at-risk, and encounters with fuel treatments and previously burned areas.

Results suggest that previous fuel treatments or wildland fires can be positively or negatively associated with daily fire management costs depending on geographic setting and landscape context. For example, fuel treatments in the eastern US were associated with lower daily management costs whereas in the western US, encounters with fuel treatments were associated with higher daily management costs. This counterintuitive finding in the western US may be due to a temporary increase in suppression effort that is intended to take advantage of these fuelbreaks on the landscape. In addition, the type of incident management team managing a fire on a given day explained a significant proportion of the variation in daily fire management costs.