Nov. 18 – The federal government funded about 32,000 wildfire management projects across the country last year.
The year before it was about 27,000.
Despite that number, there are still gaps in knowledge about the effects of some of these forest treatments and how often they are needed.
Enter the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes.
In 2021, the three SWERI universities – Northern Arizona University, Colorado State University and New Mexico Highlands University – were called upon as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to create a national database of hazardous fuel treatments, including forest thinning and prescribed burns.
“If you can see where treatments are happening and where wildfires are happening, you can plan and monitor for the future,” said Patti Dappen, geographic information systems program manager for Highlands. “Every year we face more destructive wildfires. If we have a platform that allows us to access what happened in the past and what is happening in the present, it allows us to understand and actually implement treatments to , hopefully, to prevent more serious forest fires.”
It is a cross-border, inter-institutional approach, with the aim of making publicly available federal data more accessible. Treatments are color-coded based on how recently they were completed, Dappen said, which could be used to identify areas for new treatments.
Cooperation is essential due to the cross-border nature of wildfires.
Other activities that may impact forest management but are not classified as fuel handling, such as clear-cutting, are also tracked in the database.
“We integrate federal data that is technically public, but difficult to access,” Dappen said. “Because we can create a more user-friendly, open source database and viewer, more people can see what’s happening in the landscape.”
The work is not entirely new for the New Mexico Highlands Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute. In 2015, the university’s GIS data manager, Katie Withnall, created a statewide database that inspired the federal counterpart.
“[That database] could get some attention,” Dappen said. “Then the 2021 [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] was created, SWRI was asked to build a national fuel handling database because of the success of the database in New Mexico.
The three universities recently released a beta version of the federal database. A final version is expected next year; In the meantime, Dappen says, the teams are looking for feedback. State data is also expected to be included soon.
The Treatment and Wildfire Interagency Geodatabase map, which can be viewed at reshapewildfire.org/twig/layers, could play a role in land management and public policy.
“It’s getting a better picture of what’s happening on the ground so that when land managers have money to implement new treatments, they can target and leverage existing treatments so they’re more effective,” Dappen said. “It simply provides a more transparent tool for proactive planning and management.”
