As the size and severity of wildfires across the Western United States has increased, the cost and magnitude of post-fire restoration efforts has increased as well. The Department of the Interior (DOI) spends roughly 2% of its Wildland Fire Management budget on Burned Area Rehabilitation (BAR). Although implementation of post-fire restoration treatments is expensive and labor intensive, the tracking of post-fire restoration treatment effectiveness has been sparse and disjointed across the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM�s Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) program offers a standardized framework to implement, monitor and track treatment effectiveness; inform adaptive management; and direct local management decisions. �The BLM California�s Eagle Lake Field Office used AIM to assess the success and failure of restoration treatments following the 2012 Rush Fire. The Rush Fire burned 315,557 acres, roughly one third of the public land managed by the Eagle Lake Field Office. In the winter of 2012, the Eagle Lake Field Office aerially seeded 24,000 acres by helicopter and drill seeded 3,000 acres with a rangeland-drill. In 2013, the Eagle Lake Field Office began monitoring the aerial broadcast and rangeland-drill seeding sites using AIM. In the Eagle Lake Field Office, AIM has provided a standardized framework to evaluate treatment effectiveness with quantitative benchmarks and in the context of broader landscape condition. By using realistic and applicable quantitative benchmarks, the Eagle Lake Field Office assessed the success of treatments and altered future management practices to incorporate lessons learned. This approach represents a framework for the structured and standardized implementation and evaluation of post-fire restoration treatments within the BLM.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.