Development Of Coarse Scale Spatial Data For Wildland Fire And Fuel Management

The objective of this study was to provide managers with national-level data on current conditions of vegetation and fuels developed from ecologically based methods to address these questions: How do current vegetation and fuels differ from those that existed historically? Where on the landscape do vegetation and fuels differ from historical levels? In particular, where are high fuel accumulations? When considered at a coarse scale, which areas estimated to have high fuel accumulations represent the highest priorities for treatment?

Decades of fire suppression, as well as changing land management practices, have caused vegetation to accumulate and become altered on federal lands. Concerns about the effects of wildland fires have increased efforts to reduce fuels on federal lands. These efforts also have environmental effects. The requesters asked GAO to (1) describe effects from fires on the environment, (2) assess the information gathered by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on such effects, and (3) assess the agencies approaches to environmental risks associated with reducing fuels. This report recommends that the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior (1) develop a plan to implement the agencies monitoring framework, (2) develop guidance that formalizes the assessment of landscape-level risks to ecosystems, and (3) clarify existing guidance, working with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), to assess the risks of environmental effects from reducing fuels.