New Publication! A Geospatial Framework to Assess Fireline Effectiveness for Large Wildfires in the Western USA

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. We propose a performance evaluation
framework based on both the held to engaged fireline ratio and the total fireline to perimeter ratio.
These two metrics capture whether fireline was placed in locations with high probability of engaging
with the wildfire and holding and the relative level of investment in containment compared to wildfire
growth. We also identify future research directions to improve understanding of decision quality in a
risk-based framework.

A Geospatial Framework to Assess Fireline Effectiveness for Large Wildfires in the Western USA