Data from: Learning from wildfires: a scalable framework to evaluate treatment effects on burn severity

Interruption of frequent burning in dry forests across western North
America and the continued impacts of anthropogenic climate change have
resulted in increases in fire size and severity compared to historical
fire regimes. Recent legislation, funding, and planning have emphasized
increased implementation of mechanical thinning and prescribed burning
treatments to decrease the risk of undesirable ecological and social
outcomes due to fire. As wildfires and treatments continue to interact,
managers require consistent approaches to evaluate treatment effectiveness
at moderating burn severity. In this study, we present a repeatable,
remote sensing-based, analytical framework for conducting fire-scale
assessments of treatment effectiveness that informs local management while
also supporting cross-fire comparisons. We demonstrate this framework on
the 2021 Bootleg Fire in Oregon and Schneider Springs Fire in Washington.
Our framework used 1) machine learning to identify key bioclimatic,
topographic, and fire weather drivers of burn severity in each fire, 2)
standardized workflows to statistically sample untreated control units,
and 3) spatial regression modeling to evaluate the effects of treatment
type and age on burn severity. Application of our framework showed that,
in both fires, sites recently treated with prescribed burning were the
most effective at reducing burn severity relative to untreated controls.
Thinning-only treatments, even when followed by piling and burning of
surface fuels, only produced low/moderate-severity effects under the more
moderate fire weather conditions in the Schneider Springs Fire. Our
framework offers a robust approach for evaluating treatment effects on
burn severity at the scale of individual fires, which can be scaled up to
assess treatment effectiveness across multiple fires. As climate change
brings increased uncertainty to dry forest ecosystems of western North
America, our framework can support more strategic management actions to
reduce wildfire risk and foster resilience.