The Northern Blues Restoration Partnership (NBRP) formed to support collaborative, cross-boundary forest restoration in Northeast Oregon and Southeast Washington following the selection of the Northern Blues CFLRP for funding in October 2020. The CFLRP requires a Multi-Party Monitoring Plan to address a set of monitoring questions that inform project progress, are of collective interest to stakeholders, and include mandatory core questions from the CFLRP Common Monitoring Strategy.

After a more than a century of fighting to keep fire out of forests, reintroducing it is now an important management goal. Yet changes over the past century have left prescribed burning with a big job to do. Development, wildfire suppression, rising global temperatures, extended droughts, exotic species invasions, and longer fire seasons add complexity to using this practice.

The 2014 Carlton Complex Fire in north-central Washington was a “megafire.” It burned 167,000 acres within 24 hours, driven by strong warm winds through a drought-ridden landscape. By examining burn severity within the footprints of past fuel reduction treatments and prior wildfires, scientists are identifying how strategic placement of fuel treatments in fire-prone landscapes may contribute to resilient landscapes.

Wildfires in dry Western forests are inevitable, but land management agencies and private landowners can take action to reduce the potential for loss. Fuel reduction treatments including thinning and prescribed fire are more economically and ecologically effective than fire suppression for reducing wildfire hazard. But landowners have to strategize and work together to make this happen across a landscape.

Fuel treatments are designed with multiple management goals, including improving suppression capacity and restoring the historical structure of dry forests. Fuelbreaks are a class of fuel treatment that remove fuels within a wide strip of land, with an overarching objective to reduce fire behavior and provide safe access for suppression.

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West?

In this second episode of Fire Ecology Chats, Fire Ecology (link is external) editor Bob Keane interviews Jessica Halofsky, USDA Forest Service, and David Peterson, University of Washington, to discuss the key points of their paper that synthesizes understanding of the potential effects of changing climate and fire regimes on Pacific Northwest forests.

The Hungry Bob fuels reduction project was part of a 12-site National Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) network of experiments conducted across the United States from the late 1990s through the early 2000s to determine the regional differences in applying alternative fuel-reduction treatments to forests. The Hungry Bob project focused on restoration treatments applied in low elevation, dry second-growth ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa subsp. ponderosa (Douglas ex C. Lawson) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii subsp. glauca (Beissn.)