Broad-Scale Assessment of Fuel Treatment Opportunities

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has produced estimates of the extent and composition of the Nation?s forests for several decades. FIA data have been used with a flexible silvicultural thinning option, a fire hazard model for preharvest and postharvest fire hazard assessment, a harvest economics model, and geospatial data to produce a Web-based tool to assess fuel treatment opportunities at a strategic level. This tool, the Fuel Treatment Evaluator, was used in this study to show how to identify potential fuel treatment hotspots in the Western United States.