If one state could do this…. why not the Feds?
A Boise State Radio piece I picked up from Nick Smith’s newsletter was headlined:
Local Western officials raise concerns about federal fire policy; agencies push back
About 160 officials from 11 Western states recently signed a letter that criticized declining wildfire preparedness efforts and what it described as “reckless and potentially illegal cuts to federal public land management agencies and hazardous fuels reduction efforts.”
I would guess, from the areas that the signers represented, that these officials belong to a certain political party. Of course if the headline were Western D. Officials Question R Policy it would be not exactly news.
“I want to see them all have teeth and push back and be aggressive about protecting these resources, because we can’t undo a fire,” said Jenn Kaaoush – a Superior, Colorado town councilmember whose home narrowly survived the catastrophic 2021 Marshall Fire.
Of course, that was not a federal fire and the Facilitated Learning Analysis pointed out mostly local response issues.
Anyway, remember the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters’ report, which we covered here? We had questions about why some Regions were doing so well and others not. Grassroots were able to access data that I don’t think were publicly available.
Then media (and politicians) spin it. The WaPo did get a quote from a professor at CSU, which seemed reasonable.
The figures could be skewed because of a lag in recordkeeping, given the shutdown and the busy time of year, said Camille Stevens-Rumann, an associate professor of forest and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University.
“It probably wouldn’t change the trend,” she added. “But it might change the hard numbers.”
The Boise State Public Radio included a response from the FS (10th paragraph)
But the Forest Service told the Mountain West News Bureau that full reporting was delayed by the government shutdown, meaning that the analysis was based on “incomplete data.” The agency said it ultimately got to 92% of its annual goal.
“The Forest Service delivered nearly twice the level of hazardous fuel reduction critics had claimed, successfully treating more than 3.3 million acres,” the agency wrote in an email.
This seems pretty important. Hopefully the same outlets that ran the original story will run this one.
Now, back to my wishes for 2026.. if the Forest Service had a weekly update on a publicly available website, we could have looked at the data ourselves and not needed Boise State Radio to inquire to the Press Office. It seems to me that Int and the FS should agree on definitions (through some mechanism working with the States and the public) for different treatments and accomplishments, as well as numbers of employees in different series, kinds of work, and temporary or other status. Then we all could use those numbers and write our own stories and ask our own questions. I’ve spoken before (many times) about the Peoples’ Database. It’s my wish for 2026, that we could get it going, at least for fuel treatment and wildfire accomplishments. Think of all those brilliant coders out there and all the technology we now have! If we could just agree on some definitions and reporting, it seems doable. But maybe not. What do you think?
I think this is a good idea, but as always, resource constraints may make it difficult to implement. It’s possible the agency doesn’t even have internal uniformity regarding definitions and reporting formats. Designing the external interface will also present some (possibly costly) challenges.
Still, unlike some requests for greater public transparency, this one asks for information that the agency itself finds useful for its own management purposes, and indeed already gathers, albeit in haphazard fashion. Accordingly, the FS may be more willing to address this aspect of agency transparency than it is in other cases. A push from Congress that does not involve simply stripping funds from other agency programs to pay for this initiative would be helpful (and as I recall some bills along these lines have been discussed on this blog).
Ahh… I had hoped that the effort would be justified and paid for perhaps by the USWFS… after all, they will have to design a system for themselves…
I agree that the limitations to the People’s Database are not technical abilities or talent. We’ve long overcome those barriers. I think its largely a governance issue. How do we decide what information to prioritize? And who is the “we”?
More broadly, I believe there are shared information needs between the agency and folks with widely different positions on land and resource management. Even within just the purview of fire and fuels I see shared needs, let alone other program areas. But is there any entity that can be trusted to identify and deliver on them? Expecting the agencies to take up the cause doesn’t seem to happen without an act of Congress. They just don’t have an incentive to do so otherwise. If that’s what it always comes down to, we’ll remain in a reactive position rather than using information systems for proactive adaptive management.
We need to change the relationship between information producers and consumers in a way that benefits everyone, including the agencies. And we should leverage our shared information needs to build trust along the way. That’s my wish for 2026.
Most, if not all the New Mexico signatories are Democrats in a state where in 2021 Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 57 or the Prescribed Burning Act to help reduce fuel loads and establish training and certification programs to conduct burns on private land some led by tribal members whose ancestors have been controlling overgrowth for thousands of years.
Thousands of acres of land in the public domain have been remanded to some of the 23 tribal entities in New Mexico and several public land trades (some with the Forest Service) have been completed and more are being negotiated as this is being typed sometimes because Indigenous Americans value good fire.
Montana
Until last year OPM published employment info at FedScope.
This might be close to the fuels treatment info Sharon mentions:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/95470eec0ef1424eb1e74369b3519677
The data source is the FACTS database and data that hasn’t been entered yet or coded properly obviously wouldn’t show up. So definitely we should expect a reporting lag. Some treatments might overlap as well. More detailed data about fuels and other topics is available through https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php, but an uncommon level of skill is needed.
The USFS definition for hazardous fuels reduction treatment:
“Vegetative manipulation designed to create and maintain resilient and sustainable landscapes, including burning, mechanical treatments, and/or other methods that reduce the quantity or change the arrangement of living or dead fuel so that the intensity, severity, or effects of wildland fire are reduced within acceptable ecological parameters and consistent with land management plan objectives, or activities that maintain desired fuel conditions. These conditions should be measurable or predictable using fire behavior prediction models or fire effects models.”
The NWCG definition is a little different:
“Manipulation or removal of fuels to reduce the likelihood of ignition and/or to lessen potential damage and resistance to control (e.g., lopping, chipping, crushing, piling and burning).”
https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/pms205/nwcg-glossary-of-wildland-fire-pms-205