In 1995, the U.S. Forest Service spent 16 percent of its total budget on fighting fires. Today, it’s 52 percent and growing. What’s changed? “Everything,” said Matthew Thompson, a research forester who works at the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado. “The length of the fire season, more people on the landscape to start fires or to be impacted by them, more community interest in the relation between managing fires and protecting lives, property, and natural resources, and more media interest partly because there is so much more media today, including social media.”

What hasn’t changed is the agency’s key role in managing wildland fires that threaten local communities and natural resources and its desire to manage them as safely and cost-effectively as possible.

Decision-making in the course of managing fire to safely and effectively protect communities and to protect, maintain, and even restore landscapes is a science unto itself, and Thompson is at the forefront of that research. Thompson recently earned a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his work in applying principles and practices of risk and decision analysis to wildland fire management.

His research investigates, among other topics, incentives and accountability of fire management decisions. Ultimately, the findings will ideally help bring firefighting costs down, make it safer for the men and women who risk their lives battling the big blazes, and support the agency’s mission of restoring resilient landscapes, many of which benefit from regular, low-intensity fires.

When Thompson, an engineer by training, began this line of research, he found a body of research that identified key insights but was unconnected and limited in scope.

From Treesource: https://treesource.org/news/management-and-policy/forest-service-wildfire-spending/