Wilderness and similarly managed areas serve an important and unique role for fire management within larger landscapes. These areas hold the greatest potential for learning how to use lightning-ignited fires as a cost-effective strategy for thinning forests and reducing accumulated fuels. At the same time, allowing lightning ignitions to burn in these areas can be used to build public understanding of wildland fire and help satisfy legal and policy mandates to restore natural fire regimes and ecosystem conditions. Finally, these areas are our best source of information about natural fire regimes and how management activities have altered these regimes. Our research encompasses the ecological and social sciences and is focused in three areas: 1) understanding natural fire regimes and their alteration by management, 2) developing information and tools to improve fire and fuel management planning, and 3) anticipating consequences of management alternatives. Results from our research are helping managers devise effective strategies for managing fire and fuels across the full spectrum of lands extending from wilderness outward to the wildland urban interface.

Since the last report in June 2002, we have made steady progress in all areas of our research and expanded substantially in the area of social science. In addition to a post-doc position filled in July 2002, two additional term positions were supported. Three new cooperative agreements were established and two existing agreements were amended. We communicated our research results through a variety of publications, bulletins, presentations and our web site (http://leopold.wilderness.net/research/fire.htm). We continued to leverage resources from other funding sources and contributed to two new proposals that received funding by the Joint Fire Sciences Program.

Understanding natural and altered fire regimes.

We completed analyses for a research project studying landscape scale interactions between fire regimes and ecosystems in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana and Idaho. We determined that descriptions of fire regimes for an area as large as the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness (~1 Mha) are not meaningful or helpful to managers because of the high variability of biophysical conditions within such a large area. We found that descriptions for smaller areas (~100,000 – 300,000 ha) were much more meaningful and useful for guiding fire management objectives. We found that important differences in fire regimes exist among three geographic zones within the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and that these differences are due to differences in topography and climate. We also found that large, widespread fires were common in most of the study area during the first part of the 20th century, indicating that managers should expect large fires to occur in the future. Results and recommendations were presented in a final report to USDA CSREES NRICGP and at the 2002 Fire Conference (Association for Fire Ecology). An extended abstract has been accepted for publication in the conference proceedings. To follow up on this research and further address the need for characterizing the variability of fire regime parameters, we have established a new cooperative agreement with the University of Idaho, "Variability in fire regimes across time and space."

Our cooperators at the University of Arizona finished the analysis of first year field data for the project "Comparing fire-scar analysis, fire atlas records and fire simulations in the Saguaro-Rincon Mountain Wilderness." We produced a bulletin to report on these results that show that the study area in Arizona has burned more frequently than most other ponderosa pine dominated landscapes in the US and that there is considerable spatial variability in fire frequency across the landscape. We have also determined that fire-scarred trees appear to adequately record past fire events, when compared with mapped data on recent fires. This research is providing accurate information about reference conditions and historic fire regimes, and improving our understanding of the biases associated with fire history data.

We established a cooperative agreement with the University of Montana to supplement USDA funding for a study the effects of fire suppression on soil resource availability in ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir ecosystems. During spring 2003, criteria for site selection were developed and sites were located during the summer of 2003. As a result of this site selection, we will be able to fully characterize, for the first time, a set of unmanaged ponderosa pine-Douglas fir stands that have experienced different fire regimes (from relatively frequent to very infrequent fires). This unique source of data will provide important baseline information for future management and restoration efforts.

A new collaborative project was funded by Joint Fire Science Program, "Climate drivers of fire and fuel in the northern Rockies: past, present and future." In this 3-year project, we will work with scientists from the Fire Lab and University of Idaho to assess how often, and why, regional fire events have occurred in the past, how often these regional events may occur in the future, and where and under what climatic conditions fuels management is most likely to be successful. This understanding will allow fire managers to strategically allocate suppression and fuel management resources.

We produced and distributed a data CD containing fire history data and related information for the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Complex in Idaho. These data contain all recorded fire perimeters from 1870 through 2000, and for the first time provide a complete data set of fire history across the boundaries of 4 National Forests. We distributed the data CD to 4 National Forests, 2 Forest Service Regions and several other interested parties. These data are essential for understanding current conditions in the context of fire history, setting management priorities, cross-boundary planning, and tracking fire management accomplishments.

Improving fire and fuels management planning

Anne Black was hired in July 2002 as a post-doc researcher to lead JFSP project "Identifying fire benefits and risks for wildland fuels and fire planning." Through an assessment of the wildland fire management context, she has identified a serious disconnect between land and fire management planning and outlined an approach to fire management planning that bridges this gap. This approach integrates information about fire weather, fire behavior, primary and secondary ecological and social effects. We have developed and began testing a protocol for classifying likely fire effects into 'characteristic/uncharacteristic' or 'beneficial/detrimental' categories for any set of fire weather parameters. This information is currently being used by planning teams and managers (Region 1 Forest Plan Revision Team, Fire sub-team of the Western MT Planning Zone, several NFs within Region 1, the Bitterroot Ecosystem Management Research Program, and Stevensville RD of the Bitterroot NF) to identify treatment priorities, and evaluate management alternatives for restoring fire to fire-adapted ecosystems, reducing the risks hazardous fuels pose to life and property, and containing costs of fire management.

The decision-support modeling tool, BurnPro, underwent extensive demonstration, testing, and refinement during FY2003. As part of a Joint Fire Science Program funded project, Carol Miller and Brett Davis conducted site visits to four of six study areas where the tool is being applied (Yosemite NP, Southern Sierra Geographic Information Cooperative area, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Bitterroot NF). BurnPro estimates the probability of burning across a landscape and is being used to help delineate fire management zones in fire management plans, as well as to evaluate the availability of natural ignitions for restoring natural fire regimes.

Anticipating consequences of management alternatives

Cooperators at the University of Montana completed first-year data analysis for the project "Effects of wildfire on spotted knapweed in western Montana." This study is using the fires of 2000 to assess how different factors influence post-fire spotted knapweed invasions and how biological control agents affect these interactions. We produced a bulletin to report important preliminary research results that show that the charcoal created by fire binds the chemical herbicide produced by knapweed and that biological control agents increase the production of this herbicide, thereby conferring an advantage over native plants. These findings indicate that biological control agents may not be an appropriate post-fire control method for spotted knapweed. This research is improving our ability to predict the locations of post-fire weed invasions and increasing the effectiveness of post-fire weed-control techniques. In related research, we resurveyed plots established 4 years ago in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness to investigate the effect of prescribed fire on the influx of exotic weeds. This research will give managers information about whether exotic plants are likely to invade naturally-ignited or management-ignited burn areas in wilderness, allowing them to analyze tradeoffs between restoring fire and the potential for introducing exotic plants, as well as planning mitigation strategies for these exotics in those areas where their invasion is most likely.

Two new social science research projects were initiated to help anticipate public response to fire and fuels management. One is a new project funded by Joint Fire Science Program, "Monitoring trust as an evaluation of the success of collaborative planning in a landscape level fuel hazard reduction treatment project in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana." In this 2-year project, we will conduct a community-wide assessment of residents and adjacent communities of the Bitterroot National Forest to measure public trust and identify the factors that influence this trust. The methods we will develop will allow the agency to monitor and use public trust as an important long-term indicator of success in collaborative fire and fuels management planning. The second project is developing methods to more accurately understand and map the values that local residents attach to the landscape. The social response to fire and fuels management depends partly on the public land manager's ability to protect human values attached to these places. During the summer of 2003, we collected baseline data on the meanings that Bitterroot Valley residents place on areas within the Bitterroot National Forest that are being considered for fuel hazard reduction treatments. These data will be used with landscape models to plan fuel treatments that simultaneously meet ecological and social science objectives.

Other activities

Dave Parsons was an invited panelist at the June 5-6 2003 National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry Annual Symposium on "Fire, Forest Health and Biodiversity" in Denver. He talked about the challenges of managing fire and fuels in protected areas. Since the symposium, he has been actively involved in a continuing dialog with other panelists about fire management issues and research priorities.

Carol Miller instructed a unit on the challenges of restoring natural fire regimes to wilderness for the Northern Rockies Training Center course on Managing Fire for Resource Benefits. The 69 attendees included line officers, fire management officers, fire operations specialists, and resource specialists. As a result of this unit, the attendees are able to identify the issues that need to be considered when deciding whether to take action to restore fuel conditions to wilderness, especially when these actions conflict with the objective to protect wilderness from human manipulation.

A General Accounting Office team studying "Environmental effects of catastrophic wildfires" interviewed Carol Miller, Anne Black, and Dave Parsons, who provided background and information about how the Forest Service and BLM include the environmental effects of potential wildfires in their planning and decision-making processes. We also provided materials that illustrate how to integrate fire management and land management planning. The GAO will be presenting this information in their final report to Congress.

Two staff members attended training that qualified them to provide GIS support on Fire Use Management Teams. One staff member has since worked on a two-week detail developing GIS data to support incident management in Region 1.

To evaluate the progress made by federal fire management agencies in restoring fire as a natural process to wildland ecosystems, we compiled data on acres of wildland fire use inside and outside of wilderness, as well as information on the status of wilderness fire management plans. We have identified inadequacies in current fire reporting protocols and will be raising these issues with a national team tasked with developing interagency fire reporting requirements.