• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Southern Rockies Fire Science Network

Southern Rockies Fire Science Network

JFSP Fire Science Exchange Network

  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Our Partners
  • Subregions
    • Why Subregions?
    • Black Hills
    • Wyoming Sagebrush
    • Uinta Basin
    • Wasatch Plateaus/Mountains
    • Rocky Mountains
    • Canyonlands/Desert Montane
  • Events
    • Event Summaries
  • Resources
    • Pre and Post-Fire Emergency Resources
    • Research & Publications
    • Maps, Models & Apps
    • COVID-19
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search

A geospatial framework to assess fireline effectiveness for large wildfires in the western USA

By Benjamin M. Gannon; Matthew P. Thompson; Kira Z. Deming; Jude Bayham; Yu Wei; Christopher D. O’Connor

Quantifying fireline effectiveness (FLE) is essential to evaluate the efficiency of large wildfire management strategies to foster institutional learning and improvement in fire management organizations. FLE performance metrics for incident-level evaluation have been developed and applied to a small set of wildfires, but there is a need to understand how widely they vary across incidents to progress towards targets or standards for performance evaluation. Recent efforts to archive spatially explicit fireline records from large wildfires facilitate the application of these metrics to a broad sample of wildfires in different environments. We evaluated fireline outcomes (burned over, held, not engaged) and analyzed incident-scale FLE for 33 large wildfires in the western USA from the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons. FLE performance metrics varied widely across wildfires and often aligned with factors that influence suppression strategy.

Read the full research here.

Posted by:
Gloria Edwards
Published on:
December 10, 2020

Categories: PublicationTags: fire suppression, wildfire management

Footer

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Sign up for our newsletter

Got a Question?
Email us.

This regional Fire Exchange is one of 15 regional fire science exchanges sponsored by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP).
View resources from multiple exchanges.