Abstract
The United States Forest Service, with partners, implements fuel reduction treatments on National Forests and surrounding landscapes to mitigate negative impacts from wildfire, facilitate climate adaptation, and protect communities. Understanding fuel treatment effectiveness is important for evaluating treatments against objectives to inform the strategic planning and application of treatments. An understudied aspect of fuel treatments is how existing fuel treatments are incorporated into tactical decision-making during wildfire incident response, including in cases where the fire did not directly overlap with treatments. Through interviews with fire and forest personnel (e.g., Incident Commanders, Agency Administrators, and Fuels Planners) seven different wildfires during 2020 and 2021, we investigated how fuel treatments are evaluated and considered in an incident management context. We found that treatments were considered and used during incidents in various ways including tactically as access points, for contingency planning, and to increase efficiencies related to operations and firefighter safety. The decision to use a fuel treatment was based on several conditions, including the time since the treatment was implemented or maintained, treatment location, incident conditions, and personnel dynamics within the Incident Management Team or local forest unit. We situate the implications of these findings within the complexity of problem definition for fire and wildfire decision-making literature and provide recommendations for using fuel treatments to support wildfire incident management.