On this Student Spotlight: Fire management will play a key role going forward.
Ethan Yackulic, PhD student in the school of informatics, computer and cyber systems at Northern Arizona University, looks at the best way to manage it.
Ethan Yackulic is a PhD student in the School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. His work leverages remote sensing products to measure changes in forest carbon inventories across the western United States. He is deeply passionate about playing in the many pixels of forested lands that he stares at each day on his computer screen.
Restoring Functional Fire in the West
Many western forests evolved with frequent, low-severity fire. But after a century of fire suppression, combined with intensifying drought, those natural cycles have been disrupted. Today, many fire-adapted forests face the risk of burning so severely they may never regenerate, instead converting to grass or shrublands. Treatments that reduce fuels are one tool to lower wildfire risk, however, measuring the effectiveness of treatments has, until this point, remained a tricky question.
In our study, we turned to a method commonly used to measure health interventions. Just as doctors compare outcomes between treated and untreated patients, we compared forests that received treatments to untreated forests that were otherwise in similar conditions. We then monitored differences between the two groups over time. This allowed us to ask a straightforward question: did treatments reduce fire severity and help retain forests?
The answer was yes. Across more than 200 projects in California’s Central Sierra, treated forests burned less severely and recovered more quickly. Within seven years, many had surpassed their pre-treatment carbon levels, despite extreme drought and megafires in 2020 and 2021. The strongest results came from projects that were maintained over time with prescribed fire or additional fuel reduction treatments.
The takeaway is simple: proactive management makes forests more resilient. And when forests endure, the benefits ripple outward—storing carbon, protecting water, sheltering biodiversity, and sustaining the ecosystems that people and communities rely on.
Read More:
[Frontiers] – Rising from the ashes: treatments stabilize carbon storage in California’s frequent-fire forests
