The hazardous fuel treatment and ecological restoration job that lies before federal land management agencies, tribes, states, counties, and local communities is enormous. Nationally, there has been a steady increase in acres affected by wildfire over the past four and a half decades, with a trend towards uncharacteristically severe and uncontrollable fire behavior. Two to three percent of all ignitions escape initial attack, becoming the problem fires that damage resources, threaten communities, and cost millions of dollars in suppression efforts. While not all wildland fires grow to catastrophic proportions, “problem fires” are those events that are large, destructive, dangerous, and costly to manage. They are the symptoms of a larger forest health issue, where ecological realities conflict with social expectations and economic limitations.

We must continue to treat the symptoms of problem fires through fire suppression efforts to protect communities, assets, resources, and investments. At the same time, the causes must be addressed through hazardous fuel reduction and vegetation management activities that are consistent with a variety of management objectives. These fuel and vegetation projects must be designed to encourage landscapes that offer a mixture of species and stand characteristics that are sustainable given the expected disturbance processes, including fire, insects, and disease. Only through dedication and the alignment of integrated, interagency efforts can meaningful progress be made toward restoration and maintenance of more resilient ecosystems.

Given the size of the task, annual priorities are set that address the most urgent issues first. While fuel reduction treatments have proven effective in changing fire behavior and effects at the individual stand level, the more complex issue of changing landscape-scale fire behavior, effects, and suppression costs may also be addressed with fuel treatments designed to reduce problem fire spread and intensity on the landscape. Gaming expected fire behavior scenarios at the landscape scale with tools like FARSITE or FlamMap suggests that the deliberate and strategic placement of hazardous treatments on 20-30% of the landscape may dramatically reduce the size and intensity of the problem fire affecting the entire landscape. A strategic approach to the placement of treatments, including their arrangement on the landscape, orientation relative to the prevailing wind, treatment size, treatment shape, and treatment prescription, could reduce the undesired effects of problem fires and acres burned with undesired severity.