Understanding wildfire risk can be complicated. It requires the accounting of many variables that contribute to wildfire behavior, namely terrain, fuels and weather. It also requires land managers to understand all that is at stake across a landscape — homes and communities, roads, powerlines, mature and old-growth forest, wildlife habitat and watersheds among many others.
The formula it turns out is already in use in an industry that makes its money understanding risk–the insurance sector.
“Insurance is all about calculating expected losses, the probability of some event happening and the consequences if it does happen,” said Greg Dillon, director at the Fire Modeling Institute at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab. He’s been at the fire lab for 20 years, and with numerous partners from inside and outside the Forest Service he’s been researching and developing useful tools that change how the nation understands and mitigates wildfire risk.
That equation for expected losses, along with wildfire behavior modeling and geospatial data, has evolved into an analytical approach suitably named RiskMonitor that provides land managers with a big-picture perspective of wildfire risk like never before.
Since the beginning of wildland fire management, it has been apparent that fire posed risks to life, property and natural resources. But knowing how to be proactive in mitigating those risks has not always been clear.
“One hundred years ago, we didn’t have the ability to think about wildfire risk in the same way. We thought about fire in terms of fire danger. What’s the weather? What’s the fuel moisture? What’s the likelihood of seeing fire based on those kinds of conditions?” said Dillon reflecting on the Forest Service’s formative years. Those questions are still extremely important for understanding day-to-day fire potential throughout the fire year. But the longer-term strategic understanding of what is at risk, and where, is also important for getting out ahead of problem.
“It basically allows us to understand where we need to focus, and it’s even more important when looking at larger landscapes. We have to understand something about where that risk is greatest to prioritize and target the highest probability places first,” said Dillon.
The Fire Modeling Institute runs models on the effectiveness of fuels treatments across these large landscapes, conducts the analysis and provides the outputs to land managers to inform their risk reduction objectives and help them know where treatments can be most effective at reducing risk.
“The Forest Service has a lot of science and technology that we can bring to this question of where we can be most effective. [RiskMonitor] it’s enhancing our ability to think about reducing wildfire risk on broader scales of space and time,” said Dillon.
Further than the Eye can See
Reducing wildfire risk requires a landscape-scale approach.
“When looking at large landscapes, large projects and lots of money, there are many places we could target. The experience and judgment that serves us well on smaller projects is really hard to manage on these larger ones,” said Tonja Opperman, the assistant director of fire analytics for the Intermountain Region.
Opperman speaks from experience. She got her start on a helicopter firefighting crew out of the Grand Canyon 30 years ago and has been involved in wildland fire, one way or another, ever since. “At the Grand Canyon, it was game on every day of the summer, high adrenaline and really exciting.”
Her on-the-go, action-packed summers eventually gave way to more analytic pursuits. She went back to school earning a master’s in fire ecology and transitioned her career from fighting fire on the ground with a Pulaski to fighting fire through analytics and modeling. She provides critical information to inform the agency’s work to suppress, reduce risk and restore areas affected by wildfire.
Opperman routinely travels to large wildfires across the country and conducts analysis and modeling on how those fires might behave in the coming weeks and where they might spread.
When on an active fire, analysts like Opperman have a lot of variables that influence their models and predictive analysis.
They usually know where a fire is located and its size. They have weather forecasts. They have maps of fuel types and densities of vegetation. They know exact distances between the fire and homes and other values at risk.
“We have a lot of information about a fire to help us understand where a fire is going and our best chance to confine or stop it. But when we talk about a whole region of the country and where we should put our wildfire risk reduction dollars to work, that’s a whole different story,” said Opperman.
“We don’t know where the next fire is going to start. We don’t know if it’s going to start on a hot windy day when it will be hard to catch it or on a cooler calmer day. And it’s not possible to treat every acre, so it’s important to focus our work in areas to get the best possible outcome,” she said.
That’s where RiskMonitor comes into play.
Informed by thousands of wildfire simulations based on weather, terrain, temperature, fuel and moisture among many other variables, RiskMonitor calculates the probabilities for wildfire across the landscape. Those probabilities are then mapped and overlayed on a map of known values at risk such as homes, infrastructure, wildlife habitat, communities and watersheds. The model even takes into account the susceptibility of a given value once exposed to wildfire, estimating for example how likely a wildfire is to damage a building versus a powerline.
Opperman remembers when wildfire risk wasn’t really quantifiable on a large scale at the beginning of her career.
“Now we have the luxury of looking at a coast-to-coast wildfire risk map of the contiguous U.S. based on real observations and real climate data to start making the plan,” she said. “It’s just so much more powerful than what we could have done manually in the past.”
| Date Taken: | 09.25.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 09.08.2025 14:32 |
| Story ID: | 547557 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 21 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Seeing the risk before the flames, by Andrew Avitt, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
