Informing proactive wildfire management that benefits vulnerable communities and ecological values

Abstract In response to mounting wildfire risks, land managers across the country will need to dramatically increase proactive wildfire management (e.g. fuel and forest health treatments). While human communities vary widely in their vulnerability to the impacts of fire, these discrepancies have rarely informed prioritizations for wildfire mitigation treatments. The ecological values and ecosystem services provided by forests have also typically been secondary considerations. To identify locations across the conterminous US where proactive wildfire management is likely to be effective at reducing wildfire severity and to yield co‐benefits for vulnerable communities and ecological values, we developed a set of spatial models that estimated wildfire mitigation potential (based on wildfire hazard and biophysical forest conditions) and either included or excluded information on vulnerable human communities, ecological values and ecosystem services. We then compared areas with high wildfire mitigation potential alone to refined ‘focal areas’ that overlaid social and ecological considerations to quantify the potential benefits of targeted wildfire mitigation treatments. Inclusion of social and ecological considerations substantially increased representation of vulnerable communities and ecological values in focal areas relative to the model that considered wildfire alone. For instance, restoration in these refined focal areas would cover 28% greater imperilled species richness, 45% greater water importance and 26% more families falling below the poverty line. By examining overlap between our refined focal areas and U.S. Forest Service top ranked firesheds (a prominent existing wildfire prioritization scheme), we show that our analysis can help to target wildfire mitigation efforts within firesheds to areas with particularly high social vulnerability and/or ecological value, providing an important compliment to a prioritization scheme based largely on risk to structures. Our results highlight the importance of considering ecological and social factors when implementing wildfire mitigation treatments and provide actionable guidance for integrating these considerations into existing prioritizations. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.