Feds fund national expansion of New Mexico wildfire tool
A New Mexico fire management tool is set to go national with the help of $20 million in wildfire mitigation and forest restoration funding allocated in last year’s federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The funding will help expand a vegetation treatment database managed by the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute into a nationwide database and better assess the effectiveness of different forest treatments like tree thinning and prescribed burns.
According to a Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute press release, the federal infrastructure bill allocates a total of $5.4 billion on wildfire mitigation and forest restoration projects nationwide, with $20 million going to the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes over five years. The Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes is made up of the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute at Highlands University, the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, and the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado
State University.
A spokesperson said the Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute has mapped approximately 545 treatment projects over 50,000 acres in Taos County alone, a majority of which were implemented by the N.M. Forestry Division, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and tribal entities beginning in the 1990s.
“The institute really wants to encourage private landowners to add any kind of forest or watershed treatments into the database,” the spokesperson added, encouraging the public to visit the open access document via the institute’s website, nmfwri.org.
Katie Withnall, geographic information systems specialist at the Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, said the vegetation treatment database currently maps more than 50,000 treatment projects across New Mexico and southern Colorado. She said most treatments involve selective tree removal, but noted that the database is categorized by treatment types, which include physical, chemical, fire and biological methods.
“Most of the treatments are for forest management for the prevention of catastrophic wildfire — a lot of that is [tree] thinning and prescribed fires,” Withnall said.
Withnall said the database provides the information needed for fire modeling, which can help predict wildfire risk. Additionally, the database will help land managers from multiple agencies coordinate cross-boundary project planning.
“With a database like this, people can see what’s on the other side of the fence line when they’re planning their own treatments,” Withnall said.
“We get data primarily from some of the bigger agencies [like] the Department of Agriculture and Department of Interior, the Forest Service, BLM, and New Mexico State Forestry, which is a big one that works on private land,” Withnall said. “We also get data from the tribes, soil and water conservation districts, some municipalities, and the State Land Office.”
Dennis Carril, fuels program manager for the Carson National Forest and Santa Fe National Forest, said the database will help a multitude of agencies across the country to collaborate on and prioritize watershed treatment projects, much like the 2019 Agreement for Shared Stewardship between the state and the U.S. Forest Service.
“The state action plan from state forestry had a big analysis to prioritize watersheds across the state based on proximity to infrastructure, erodible soils” and other considerations, Carril said, adding that greater cooperation brings more efficiency. “It ranked the watersheds for treatments.”
Carril noted that the Forest Service maintains its own publicly accessible restoration and treatment database, the Forest Service Activity Tracking System, from which the institute draws data, integrating it with information provided by other agencies.
“What’s come into play with the infrastructure bill is a national filter,” Carril continued. “They have [an] analysis from a few years back looking at priority firesheds. The concept of watersheds is water follows a gravity path; a fireshed gets at the fact that fire doesn’t respect boundaries of watersheds and jurisdictions.”
A national vegetation treatment database will help prioritize firesheds — defined areas where fire is likely, or not likely, to spread — for treatments, and serve as a planning tool for pre-treatment compliance surveys related to cultural sites or the federal Endangered Species Act.
“The infrastructure bill is going to change the way the Forest Service does business,” Carril said. “This is same concept as for the state of New Mexico but for the whole [national] system.
Alan Barton, director of the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, said mapping treatments will provide the infrastructure that facilitates the work on the ground. “Congress is committed to the database, and people in forestry see the value of this. It will be a really valuable tool once it’s up and running,” Barton said, adding that creating the national vegetation treatment database and conducting research on treatment effectiveness — among other projects — will require the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes to expand their staff.
“The question we’re grappling with right now is, how do we take that map and turn it into a nationwide map. That was the charge that Congress gave us,” said Barton. “But not every state looks like New Mexico — some states have much more intensive forest management, and some states have very few forests, and little forest management.”