Modeling wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration in the wildland-urban interface: A study of the montane zone of the Colorado Front Range

In response to catastrophic wildfires, several wide-reaching forest management policies have been enacted in recent years, including the National Fire Plan and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003. Such policies aim both to reduce the threat of wildfire (here called wildfire mitigation) and to restore historic forest structure (here called ecological restoration). A key premise underlying these policies is that fire suppression in the 20th century has made forests denser than they were historically. Thus, forest thinning is viewed as simultaneously achieving the goals of wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration.; For the montane zone of Boulder County, Colorado, this study presents several new GIS-based models that help assess where and under what circumstances mechanical thinning could achieve both goals and where these goals are contradictory. These models are particularly useful for assessing the feasibility of management goals in landscapes that are spatially heterogeneous in terms of both natural factors (e.g. fire hazard, forest conditions) and social factors (e.g. exurban development, land ownership). It is found that, contrary to current assumptions, the goals of wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration converge in only a small part of the landscape. Furthermore, current forest management practices---such as thinning dense stands on Federal Lands near exurban development---may be contrary to achieving both wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration in the study area. Spatial models of human-environment relationships such as the ones developed in this study help explore the variability within complex systems, which is essential for informed policymaking.