New Mexico Highlands Contributed to Development of National Database of Forest Fuel Treatments
The federal government funded around 32,000 wildfire management projects last year around the nation.
The year before, it covered around 27,000.
Despite that number, there are still gaps in knowledge about the effects of some of these forest treatments and how frequently they are required.
Enter the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes.
In 2021, the three SWERI universities — Northern Arizona University, Colorado State University and New Mexico Highlands University — were conscripted as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to create a national database of hazardous fuel treatments, which include forest thinning and prescribed burns.
"If you're able to see where treatments are happening and where wildfires are happening, you can plan and monitor for the future," said Patti Dappen, Highlands' geographic information systems program manager. "We are facing more destructive wildfires every year. If we have a platform so we can access what happened in the past and what's happening in the present, it allows us to understand and actually implement treatments to prevent, hopefully, more severe wildfires."
It's a cross-boundary, interagency approach, with the goal of making publicly available federal data more accessible. Treatments are color coded based on how recently they were completed, Dappen said, which could be used to identify areas for new treatments.
Collaboration is essential because of the boundary-crossing nature of wildfires. Other activities that might impact forest management but aren't classified as a fuel treatment, like clear-cutting, are also tracked in the database.
