Pacific Northwest Research Station

Fire Research

Public interest in fire research has increased in recent years as severe wildfires have driven the desire for a long-term strategy to restore fire-prone ecosystems. Society’s concerns about safety in the wildland-urban interface, air quality, the role of fire in ecosystems, and maintaining the stability of those ecosystems in a time of rapid global change drive fire research at the Pacific Northwest Research Station. Those concerns have been elevated by Congress through legislation over the past decade, and Congress holds research accountable for producing tools that are useful and inform management decisions for our Nation’s wildlands.

Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory

To highlight the rapidly increasing importance of fire research, the Pacific Northwest Research Station designated the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, in 2003. This step recognized 30 continuous years of groundbreaking work by researchers in Seattle in understanding fire behavior and effects. The lab is evolving into a central location for core fire research, bringing together a variety of Forest Service scientists around the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to work on universal scientific questions of global significance. Close collaboration with prestigious scientific and academic institutions assures that world-class research is conducted by scientists at the lab.

Context of This Briefing

The 2001 National Fire Plan legislation and funding responded to the rapidly growing concern about wildfires across the Nation. Some funding from that plan has gone to support additional fire research. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 increased this focus and immediacy of research on fire issues to prevent catastrophic wildfires and save lives and property.

Our scientists work to improve the ability to predict fire behavior and effects, and improve effectiveness and efficiency of hazardous fuel treatments across the landscape.

Decision Support Tools

Many tools help evaluate the potential for various types of fire behavior and the effect of different kinds of hazardous fuel treatments.

These tools are known as “decision-support tools.” They can be used by managers and others to provide a set of plausible scenarios, or outcomes, based on a specific situation or multiple options. It remains up to the decisionmakers, on the ground or at regional and national planning levels, to use the tools and analyze their outputs based on their professional knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool.

In a quest to balance accuracy and efficiency, a number of tools are available to provide information across the landscape.

Development of each tool brought together scientists, computer programmers, technicians, field crews, cooperating agencies, educational institutions, and those who control funding sources to ensure a successful product delivered in a timely fashion.