Fire and Fuels

These POD People Are Friendly: Check Out the RMRS PODs Website

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No, not those Pod People!  I mean these POD people: the WRMS team (apparently pronounced “worms”) and the PODs User Community.

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John Marshall had a good suggestion that we not use acronyms without explaining them.  I had used PODs, and when I went looking for a good explanation, I found this excellent Rocky Mountain Research Station site that has everything about them that a person might want to know in one place.  Kudos, applause and mega-appreciation to RMRS and the PODs people!

 

We had also been talking about why more panels and media don’t involve fire suppression folks..  here is a video from RMRS that does just that.. about PODS.

PODs are being used right now based on what folks have, roads, old fires, and so on.  They also “being used by resource managers to proactively define meaningful projects, plan
fuels management, and conduct prescribed fire.”  So it appears that operational (fire) folks are in the driver’s seat, with concerns about values at risk, and is also collaborative. 

At the same time, PODs also carry with them, or at least seem to be related to, the idea “if you design them well you can do more WFWB (wildfire with benefits; sorry my own acronym, there are currently too many floating around to pick one; this one was obviously selected due to its resemblance to the commonly used expression “friends with benefits”).

As Dan Dallas says in the video, fire people have never seen these kinds of fire behavior before.  At the same time, there is a story that “we know what we’re doing, trust us when we want to use WFWB.”  This seems a bit of a paradox, but it’s altogether possible that I’m missing something (or many things).  Hopefully a fire person out there can enlighten us on this.

There are interesting videos (with amazing GIS stuff)  describing how PODs were used on the Dixie Fire,  the Twenty Five Mile Fire, and the Balsinger Fire in 2021. Now, fire people are notorious for acronyms, and concepts that sound like standard English but mean something else.  So if you run into any of these let me know, and we can ask around as to what they mean.

 

 

What Others Think About Wildfires: Society of Environmental Journalists Panel 2019

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I’ve been interested in how stories get covered by various journalists and press entities.   In 2019, I attended a session for journalists learning about wildfires at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Fort Collins. There were many fascinating differences between their culture and that of, say, SAF, including high quality free food, drink, and swag from ENGOs.

I think it’s worth listening to the recording, of the session to get an idea of how others think and talk about what’s important about wildfires.  Some seem absolutely sure of things that we all know are contested among both scientists and practitioners. But maybe it’s just a cultural way of making statements and sounding sure.

It’s especially interesting to listen to these 2019 ideas with our current knowledge of how Congress, California, and Colorado are currently putting megabucks into fuel treatments.

At the beginning, the moderator, Michael Kodas, introduces the speakers and says that George Wuerthner’s book is an “excellent resource for covering wildfire issues.”

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Here’s a quote from a recent op-ed of Wuerthner’s from July 2021:

Today, with regards to wildfire, we should be saying over and over, it’s the climate stupid! The heat, drought and other variables caused by human climate warming is super-charging wildfires. Yet the response of most agencies and politicians is to suggest more logging/thinning as a panacea.

The proponents of active forest management assert that these tactics can reduce fire intensity and thus is a beneficial policy to reduce large blazes. However, fuel reductions do not change the climate or weather. And most of the scientific support for thinning/logging is based on modeling of fuel loading, not real-life experiences.

By promoting “active forest management” as a panacea for wildfire, we trade inevitable negative consequences of logging/thinning that occur today and get only a tiny chance that any fuel reduction will influence a wildfire.

There are so many interesting things about these statements.

“most of the scientific support for thinning/logging is based on modeling of fuel loading, not real-life experience”

This is probably one of the reasons the group of scientists wrote the 10 Common Questions paper.

“get only a tiny chance that any fuel reduction will influence a wildfire.”

But we’ve seem FTEM numbers that don’t agree with that (plus our own experiences).

Do any of us think that if we stopped producing GHGs today our fire problems would go away?

Marc Heller of E&E News also quoted  Wuerther last month in the article mentioned here:

A debate over the practice continues to play out.

One of the skeptics is George Wuerthner, a Bend, Ore., ecologist and director of Public Lands Media, part of the environmental group Earth Island Institute. Wuerthner told E&E News he’s not convinced of the main argument behind prescribed burning — that decades of total fire suppression have led to overstocked forests that need to be cleared in part with fire.

Wuerthner said that in his view, increased wildfires aren’t being driven so much by too much fuel as by climate change.

“Fuels are not what is driving large blazes,” Wuerthner said in an email. “Climate/weather that includes low humidity, drought, high temps, and most importantly wind. And prescribed burning does nothing to change those major influences.”

And prescribed burning and other fuels-reduction work doesn’t necessarily diminish wildfires when they do come, Wuerthner said, although the Forest Service pointed to several examples from 2021 suggesting the opposite.

Wuerthner pointed to the Camp Fire that destroyed thousands of homes in Paradise, Calif., in 2018. In that case, he said, the fire burned through areas that had been treated through logging and prescribed burns, thanks to high winds.

So Wuerthner is actually against prescribed burning, as well as the less popular thinning.  Which I think makes him an outlier, although an apparently popular one.  When are outliers worth reporting on and when are they purveyors of “misinformation”? (Rhetorical question)

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A couple of other observations:

Rod Moraga was the only fire suppression person presenting.. it makes me wonder why more current IC folks aren’t out and about telling their stories. are they not available, or don’t moderators ask? Or don’t they know whom to ask? Is there a communications plan for the Interagency Fire folks? Or each agency’s fire folks? It seems like that would be increasingly important as social license is developed  for prescribed and MFRB fires.

One of the speakers, Chela Garcia of the Hispanic Access Fund, at about 18:46 talks about an experiment the Forest Service is doing working with the acequia system to pay a mayordomo and leñeros to thin 275 acres. They have a year’s time to finish the blocks and are paid $300 on completion according to this interesting article on the Kiowa-San Cristobal WUI (Carson NF).

There’s a lot there, so please share your observations. It looks like you can listen to any of the other presentations as well (climate, Indian Country, solutions journalism and so on.

Wildfire Today on California Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire

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Bill Gabbert takes a look at the California beneficial fire plan at Wildfire Today here.

It seems like the FS has most of the work, 150K acres annually target for PB and “estimated” for FMRB. Now, we would not like, perhaps, the FS to have a target for FMRB (or would we?) because that might affect their decision-making (or would it?). So what does it mean (if anything) to lay that number out there.. an FMRB program as big as the PF program?

I wonder whether the pre-fire decision making for FMRB uses the same thinking for the Park Service, the State on private lands, and the Forest Service, and exactly what kind of pre-fire decision-making is required? A Fire use plan amendment? Maybe all of that is in the Strategic Plan.

This is important to highlight, I think, because there are folks who are concerned over the use of FMRB in particular, and if half your program is that, it seems like it’s particularly important to develop trust and social license; open decision-making seems like one piece of that.

Anyway, here are some excerpts from Bill’s post:

The plan released last week by the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force indicates that the state of California will begin managing some fires for resource benefit, major change in their policy. They will evaluate areas on state land where modified fire suppression strategies can be implemented, such as land trusts, ranches, and timber owners. Where appropriate and authorized by the state Legislature, CAL FIRE will use plans and agreements with land managers and landowners in order to allow unintentional ignitions to burn under predetermined and prescribed conditions, to accomplish resource benefits similar to prescribed fire.

The key elements of the plan include:

  • Launching an online prescribed fire permitting system to streamline the review and approval of prescribed fire projects;
  • Establishing the state’s new Prescribed Fire Claims Fund to reduce liability for private burners;
  • Beginning a statewide program to enable tribes and cultural fire practitioners to revitalize cultural burning practices;
  • A prescribed fire training center to grow, train, and diversify the state’s prescribed fire workforce;
  • An interagency beneficial fire tracking system;
  • Pilot projects to undertake larger landscape-scale burns; and
  • A comprehensive review of the state’s smoke management programs to facilitate prescribed fire while protecting public health.

“This plan is vital to improve the health and resilience of the state’s forests, reduce wildfire risk of vulnerable communities, and increase stewardship by Native American fire practitioners,” said Task Force Co-Chair and U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Jennifer Eberlien.

Targets, California prescribed fire and cultural burning

The plan, California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the use of Beneficial Fire, March 2022, was developed by the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. It can be downloaded here: (large 17 MB file).

Across FS in 2021, Prescribed and Beneficial Fire Produced 67% of Total Fuels Reduction: E&E News Story

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From the 2023 Budget Justification Statement

I’m sure there are plenty of interesting things in the Forest Service 2023 Budget Justification Statement. You all are welcome to point them out in the comments. Marc Heller of E&E News wrote a story on the prescribed fire and hazardous fuel numbers that I excerpted above.  To simplify another way, Beneficial wildfire (BW) acres were equivalent to 36% of the PB.   If the sum of BW and PB were lumped together though (fire-based hazardous fuel treatments), they would be 67% of the total acres accomplished.  It would be interesting IMHO to see BW broken out by Region.

“The success of the program was primarily a result of favorable weather creating more opportunities for burning and a concerted effort to improve coordination among regions to mobilize resources to support seasonal burning,” the Forest Service said in its budget justifications to Congress as part of the spending request for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

“The Forest Service achieved this level of accomplishment while also managing a significant wildfire response workload, providing support to the national COVID-19 response, and overcoming challenges for performing work in a COVID-19 environment,” the agency said.

In fiscal 2021, the vast majority of prescribed fires occurred in the Forest Service’s Southern region, where the agency reported more than 1.2 million acres burned, or 81 percent of the hazardous fuels work there.

In the Pacific Southwest, which includes California, the Forest Service used prescribed fire on 45,501 acres, or 25 percent of the total hazardous fuels work.

The percentage was lowest in the Intermountain region, which covers parts of six states in the northern and middle Rockies, Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. There, prescribed fire accounted for 16 percent of hazardous fuels treatment, or 33,378 acres.

The total of 1.8 million acres across the forest system beat the 10-year average of 1.4 million acres of prescribed burns, the agency said, an indication of officials’ increased embrace of the practice, as well as conditions favoring it. Congress asked for the report in an appropriations measure.

In the South, the Forest Service said, a lack of snow as well as intermittent drying between rains makes favorable conditions for prescribed fire. Forests there grow fast and need treatment every few years, the agency said.

But in Alaska, wet conditions and snowfall make prescribed burning less needed, the Forest Service said. That may change in the future, the agency added, because spruce beetles have been killing trees in the Chugach National Forest, possibly raising wildfire threats.

For the forthcoming fiscal year, the Forest Service didn’t state an acreage goal for prescribed burns but said it plans to use various treatments on 3.8 million acres, which would include thinning and planned fire. The national forest system totals 193 million acres, and the agency has acknowledged that far more land needs hazardous fuels removal than can be done in the short term.

There’s also a discussion of the prescribed fire “controversy” which I’ll take up in another post. Again, there’s plenty of interesting facts and examples in the Budget Request so please highlight any of interest below.

WGA News Roundup: Prescribed Fire, Thinning and Restoration Center

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From the WGA Best of the West today:

The Western Governors’ Association keeps you updated on the latest news in the West. Here are the top stories for the week starting March 21, 2022. (Photos courtesy of  USDA, NASA/STScI via AP)

With nearly 90% of nine western states already experiencing drought, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, western states are taking advantage of the abundant resources available in the U.S. Forest Service’s $50 billion 10-year forest management plan and ramping up mitigation efforts in preparation for the summer wildfire season – strategies for which are discussed in WGA’s latest ‘Out West’ podcast episode Fixing America’s Forests.

With the arrival of spring and better weather conditions, many states are planning prescribed burns. In Idaho, the U.S. Forest Service is developing the ‘Honey Badger’ 20-year forest management project, which will use prescribed burns on more than 52,000 acres of the Coeur d’Alene National Forest. After enduring the devastating Caldor Fire that burned more than 221,000 acres last year, the Tahoe Fire Fuels Team is conducting controlled burns at several sites around Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also plans to carry out a ‘Prescribed Burn Plan’ in Montana’s Flathead National Forest. In Colorado, a fire management team with the U.S. Forest Service is using prescribed burns at popular destinations, including Keystone Gulch, Barton Gulch and Miners Creek Road.

Forest thinning is also a major part of these fire mitigation efforts. The U.S. Forest Service recently concluded an environmental review for large-scale thinning projects in Arizona. The ‘Rim Country Project’ will cover more than 3,700 square miles within the Kaibab, Coconino, Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests. Southeast Alaska plans to restore and accelerate the development of young-growth forests by manually thinning stands on more than 100,000 acres. Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources is assessing new ways to thin forests, implementing a strategy that uses the funds generated from thinning projects for school construction.

Grassroots organizations are also getting involved with mitigation efforts focused on private lands. In Oregon, the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative received $500,000 in grants for work that will include thinning on more than 300 acres of private land.

Along with protecting areas from catastrophic wildfire, many communities are hoping these projects will also help boost their local economies. The ‘All Hands All Lands’ crew in New Mexico is developing a reforestation center to restore burned areas and generate up to 500 skill-based jobs over the next 30 years, which closely aligns with the Western Governors’ priorities outlined in the policy resolution, Workforce Development in the Western United States. Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest is also using forest management to create economic opportunity, and the state’s ‘Golden Butterfly’ project will generate jobs through prescribed burns and logging.

Yale Forest Forum Bioenergy from Forests Webinar Series: Daniel Sanchez Next Tuesday on Carbon-beneficial Forest Management in California

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The Yale Forest Forum has been running a speaker series on bioenergy from forests.  Most of the presenters (despite my input) seem to be eastern, southern, international or urban, although this one by Steve Hamburg sounds interesting:

Determining Forest-derived Bioenergy’s Impacts on the Climate Why is it so Contentious? (Steve is a classmate of mine who works for EDF, so I might be biased, though I haven’t listened to it). Here’s a link to a video of the presentation. Any TSW reader who wants to watch and write a post is welcome.

There are two that deal with western-wildfire- fuel treatment kinds of concerns, one person from Oregon (Matt Donegan) on April 5. Titled “The Potential Role of Bioenergy in Mitigating Wildfire in the West”

And next Tuesday at 9:30 MT (they’re all on Tuesdays at the same time), there’s one with Daniel Sanchez at U of California that looks interesting.

Innovative wood products for carbon-beneficial forest management in California

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 – 11:30am

Innovative Wood Products for Carbon-Beneficial Forest Management in California

Natural carbon sinks can help mitigate climate change, but climate risks—like increased wildfire—threaten forests’ capacity to store carbon. California has recently set ambitious forest management goals to reduce these risks. However, management can incur carbon losses because wood residues are often burnt or left to decay. This study applies a systems approach to assess climate change mitigation potential and wildfire outcomes across forest management scenarios and several wood products. We find that innovative use of wood residues supports extensive wildfire hazard reduction and maximizes carbon benefits. Long-lived products that displace carbon-intensive alternatives have the greatest benefits, including wood building products. Our results suggest a low-cost pathway to reduce carbon emissions and support climate adaptation in temperate forests.

Daniel L. Sanchez – Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension, University of California-Berkeley

Daniel L. Sanchez studies engineered biomass & bioenergy systems that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Trained as an engineer and energy systems analyst, Sanchez’s work and engagement spans the academic, nongovernmental, and governmental sectors. As an Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension, he runs the Carbon Removal Lab, which aims to commercialize sustainable carbon dioxide removal technologies, and supports outreach to policymakers and technologists in California and across the United States

Wildfire, Carole King and an Urban Majority House Committee- Tomorrow!

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From the national presentation as part of the NFF roundtables.

Bill Gabbert at Wildfire Today has a helpful post with links on the Congressional hearing tomorrow on wildfire.

Remembering that Congressional Hearings are political theater.. it’s only appropriate that Carole King will be talking about how to deal with wildfires.   I guess the only witnesses who have worked directly with fire suppression are Chief Moore (they had to ask him, I guess) and the (one) minority witness, Jim Hubbard. Not a good look, majority. Not to disrespect TEK or scientists.

Here’s the witness list:
Mr. Randy Moore
Chief, U.S. Forest Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture

Panel II

Ms. Carole King
Celebrated Singer-songwriter, Land Conservation Advocate

Ms. Ali Meders-Knight
Mechoopda Tribal Member
Traditional Ecological Knowledge Practitioner

Dr. Michael Gollner
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Berkeley
Deb Faculty Fellow
Berkeley Fire Research Lab

Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala
Chief Scientist, Wild Heritage
Project of Earth Island Institute

Mr. James Hubbard (minority witness)
Former Under Secretary, Natural Resources and Environment
Department of Agriculture

I thought that this was rather odd:

While wildfires are an important part of maintaining healthy forest ecosystems, careful prevention work is crucial to mitigating the damage from increasingly dangerous fires.  The hearing will examine several strategies the Forest Service employs to prevent wildfires including prescribed burns, thinning, and commercial logging, as well as the challenges the Forest Service faces, such as a tight budget and an influential commercial logging industry.

I wonder how exactly the commercial logging industry is a problem.. for those of us in Colorado and the SW, a lack of logging industry is a problem, let alone an influential one. If you look at the map above, you’ll see lots of firesheds at risk with minimal timber industry. Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, LA, San Diego, the Front Range of Colorado, around Santa Fe, Albuquerque and so on.

But perhaps members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Environment Subcommittee aren’t familiar with these areas. Let’s look at the composition of the majority..

Ro Khanna, California, Chair- representing Silicon Valley
Jim Cooper, Tennessee – Nashville
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City
Rashida Tlaib, Detroit
Jimmy Gomez, LA
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Chicago
Cori Bush, St.Louis

Well then.

Then there’s the fact that this is usually the biz of the Natural Resources Committee, so it seems unlikely that this will yield anything substantive.

But maybe these folks will learn something about our world (she said optimistically). Might  be interesting.

Effectiveness of Fuel Treatments at the Landscape Scale: Jain et al. 2022

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I was looking for a “Scientist of the Week” to honor and ran across this JFSP report. I’d like to give a vote of appreciation to these authors, and to the folks at JFSP for funding a useful synthesis of the research.

What I think it interesting about this paper is that the authors used different forms of knowledge (empirical, simulation, and case studies) to look at the question.   I also like that they separated out (1) direct wildfire effects, (2) impacts to suppression strategies and tactics, and (3) opportunities for BWU. Some studies only talk about (1) or, in some cases,  it’s not clear what exactly they are talking about. Here’s one chart.

I particularly liked the section “Identified management and policy considerations and research gaps” on page 25.

Here is an interesting section of that:

Our synthesis focused primarily on how fuel treatments performed in the event of large wildfires, rather than the effect of fuel treatments at keeping wildfires small. Treatments offer suppression opportunities and subsequently influence how many fires are being extinguished in fuel treatments. In the case studies, there were comments that the wildfires ignited outside the fuel treatments and therefore when fuel treatments were burned by wildfires, the wildfires were already large. If fuel treatments allow for effective wildfire management, including successful full suppression compared to untreated areas, our focus may have undervalued their suppression benefit.


Longevity of fuel treatments was mentioned in all three synthesis types. In most cases fuel treatments were short–lived from 1 year to 20 years; however, in most cases the longevity of fuels was focused on surface fuels. Future studies should focus on the longevity of treatment effects in each relevant fuel stratum to test the following hypotheses: 1) surface fuels have the shortest fuel treatment longevity; 2) crown fuels have the longest fuel treatment longevity; 3) ladder fuels longevity decreases when crown fuels are separated creating growing space for latter fuels to flourish. Studies that focus on fuel strata longevity can inform managers when is it necessary to conduct maintenance treatments and choose a method of treatment that extends treatment longevity.


A discussion of research gaps in empirically based studies is premature given the current state of knowledge. Empirical approaches to understanding landscape–level fuel treatment effectiveness are in their infancy. Indeed, the field is at a point where clear and precise terms and concepts are not broadly recognized. The fundamental issue is the varied and  imprecise use of the term ‘landscape.’ Wildfire is a landscape–level process. Fuel treatment effectiveness should be evaluated by how it affects that process, functionally, from a landscape perspective. The terms landscape scale and landscape size have little generalizable meaning. Large wildfires and or large treatments may be called ‘landscape’, but our inference on treatment effectiveness will remain constrained to within–site (i.e., within treatment) effects if the sampling design and analysis are site–level and not also measuring effects outside the treatment footprint. Therefore, instead of identifying gaps in understanding, there should be 1) broad recognition of what is meant by landscape–level fuel treatment effectiveness and how the characteristics of fuel treatments affect wildfire activity outside of treatment boundaries, and 2) long–term commitment to designing and implementing research projects at the landscape level over large areas that can inform questions and test hypotheses about the type, size, density, and configuration of fuel treatments that best affect subsequent wildfire in desirable directions.

The authors say “Wildfire is a landscape-level process. Fuel treatment effectiveness should be evaluated by how it affects that process, functionally, from a landscape perspective.” It seems to me that effectiveness would be measured as “do these treatments make wildfires easier to manage, with management including protecting communities, water and other infrastructure, and protecting species and watersheds from excessively negative impacts.” And I don’t really care about defining “landscape scale” except for the idea that say if you are planning PODs, you obviously have to think at the appropriate scale. But perhaps we all have different definitions. That could certainly make researchers’ lives difficult if we are all operating from different definitions and thinking we mean the same thing.

4FRI By The Numbers- January 2022 Accomplishment Report

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Why it 4FRI important?  At our Region 2 Wildfire Strategy Roundtable, I heard “entrepreneurs need some guarantees for supply.” Which makes sense. But as we have seen, that and “having NEPA done” hasn’t necessarily worked out as well as expected for a variety of reasons that are important to understand.  Since they are the main pioneers in the efforts to do fuel treatments at scale in places without existing infrastructure sufficient to process the material (a common problem across the west), I think it’s worth understanding their context to help understand how replicable it is in other places.

Here’s a handy chart of what they accomplished by year.

 

Here’s the January accomplishment report. It includes a list of NEPA projects and NEPA status.

Forest Service Wildfire Strategy: Ideas from Bill Crapser

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As part of the Region 2 Wildfire Strategy Roundtable presentations, Bill Crapser, the Wyoming State Forester, had some suggestions that struck a chord with me.

First, the “winners and losers” challenge. Bill says:

I believe we are setting up a world of winners and losers that will quickly devolve into battles that will erode political support for the programs, and destine us to failure.  Competitive programs that rely on grant writing abilities rather than needs, do not do justice to our forests and rangelands, and are inherently biased toward traditionally underserved communities.

From what the FS reps said, I feel like they have a handle on this.  There’s regular appropriations to fill in gaps, and there is the Admin’s concern for equity (although it’s not clear how exactly that will play out). It’s definitely something to watch out for though.. if we look at the pattern of CFLRPS and the Wildfire Strategy maps, there are many blanks.. usually where there aren’t many people and/or they didn’t make the proposal cut.  And of course, the Wildfire maps are focused on areas with the highest risk of transmission to the most populated communities, with some kind of equity overlay applied perhaps in the future.

Second, and most of interest to me since the only aspect of ARRA I was involved with was one silly kerfuffle. A forest had a project to reroute a campground road partially into a Roadless Area. The project was approved for ARRA funds (and announced) and then questioned by  the FS Roadless internal project review process.  Awkward for the Admin at the time. Entirely unnecessary (the road was rerouted for environmental reasons) drama. I guess the lesson was “alignment of different priorities and programs at all levels and sooner rather than later.”

Here’s what Bill says:

Flashbacks of the 2010 Stimulus Legislation flash through my mind, with terms like “shovel ready”, and we need to show success early floating around.  Some of you will recall that after the ARRA programs, came the audits that several of us suffered through, and where several State Foresters lost their jobs, due entirely on rushing into projects with no clear expectations or sideboards.  This time around we need to take a breath, and make sure we all understand the rules of engagement before we dive in to the deep end.

Here are Bill’s suggestions:

First, we need to slowdown just a little and make sure we all understand what we are trying to do, how the different programs interface,  what the rules are, what reporting guidelines will be in place, and what the expectations will be for measuring success.

Next, we need to remember the old saying ‘that a high tide raises all boats”. We need to avoid the winner- loser paradigm wherever possible.

 We also have to collectively work on work force development, think about non-traditional partners, and look at more efficient ways to get the needed work done.

Here’s a link to Bill’s complete talk.

I’m sure TSW readers participated in and observed ARRA programs.. what did you learn from those that we might apply to the current Wildfire Strategy? Other ideas?