Assessment

* Fire-Alternative Views

* Careless and Indiscriminate Fire Use

Strategies

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Defensible Fuel Profile Zones in Support of Goals 1 and 3

A key component of the proposed strategies is development of a network of broad DFPZs. Whereas initially addressing goals 1 and 3, the DFPZs will actually help to address all of the stated fire-related goals. Fuel-reduction treatments will be designed to address the specific local issues (e.g., establishing a community defense zone, or breaking up areas of continuous high-hazard fuels, or designating a strip or block of land to form a zone of defensible space where both live and dead fuels are reduced).
Such DFPZs are best initially placed primarily on ridges and upper south and west slopes and, where possible, along existing roads. They also should be located with respect to urban-wildland intermix and other high-value areas (such as old-growth or wildlife habitat areas), areas of high historical fire occurrence, and/or areas of heavy fuel concentration. Thinning from below and treatment of surface fuels should result in fairly open stands, dominated mostly by larger trees of fire-tolerant species. DFPZs need not be uniform, monotonous areas, however, but may encompass considerable diversity in ages, sizes, and distributions of trees. The key feature should be the general openness and discontinuity of crown fuels, both horizontally and vertically, producing a very low probability of sustained crown fire. Care must be exercised in the design and construction so that forest aesthetic values are largely retained and watershed values are not impaired. The open-canopied conditions would favor relatively abundant herbaceous growth. Stands probably would be somewhat similar to those that dominated many ridges and upper south slopes in presettlement times (on average, more open than on other sites because of more xeric conditions and more frequent fires). The heavy thinning will promote faster growth of trees into large size classes less susceptible to fire damage. Further details of this approach are provided in volume II, chapter 56.
DFPZs should offer multiple benefits by providing not only local protection to treated areas (as with any fuel-management treatment) but also (1) safe zones within which firefighters have improved odds of stopping a fire, (2) interruption of the continuity of hazardous fuels across a landscape, and (3) various benefits not related to fire, including, for example, improved forest health, greater landscape diversity, and increased availability of relatively open forest habitats dominated by large trees.
DFPZs are an initial, not an exclusive, focus for fuel-management activities. The DFPZs are not a final solution. Rather, they should be viewed as an initial step in bringing large portions of landscapes into more defensible and fire-resilient condition. As the hazard level of various landscapes is brought down, the DFPZs will tend to blend into the surrounding landscapes. It must be recognized that desirable fuels conditions, once achieved, will require periodic maintenance or conditions will revert to hazardous states.
How will society pay for all the fuels management that will be necessary, given the huge areas that need to be treated? Given historical levels of funding and the current direction of federal budgets, it seems highly unlikely that federally appropriated funds will make more than a dent in the problem. Most of the limited appropriated funds are probably best spent to support prescribed burning in natural fuels where there is a special emphasis on reestablishing natural processes (goal 2). Existing cooperatively funded programs of the Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection might be restructured to assist in funding some of the private landowner share. Significant progress on large-scale fuels treatments will have to be an economically self-sustaining enterprise, supported largely from the sale of forest products. Part of this can come from multiproduct sales, in which sawtimber and other high-value products subsidize the removal of lower-value material. Local property owners and communities may need to provide most of the support for treatments in the intermix areas.
In some portions of the Sierra Nevada, especially higher-elevation areas, including substantial acreage of red fir and other high-elevation vegetation types, large, high-severity fires are not as serious a concern. Thus neither goals 1, 3, and 4 nor DFPZs are particularly applicable. Many such areas are located in national parks and wilderness areas. The proposed strategy in these areas involves extending the use of prescribed natural fire (PNF) as much as possible (including appropriate areas outside parks and wildernesses) and augmenting PNFs with management-ignited prescribed fires (MIPFs) as needed to reestablish near-natural fire regimes. MIPF also should become a key part of the management of other areas in which restoration of natural processes is a major management objective. Recently approved new federal policies will permit wildfires to be managed if they meet resource objectives and if fire-hazard conditions elsewhere are not likely to require the deployment of suppression forces from the managed fire unit.