A Comprehensive Guide to Fuel Treatment Management Practices 

for Dry Mixed Conifer Forests in the Northwestern United States

Monitoring

Short- and medium-term evaluation of how fuel treatments are working is the only 

way to know if the hundreds of activities on the ground are adding up to the goals of 

more resilient landscapes and increased safety of people and property. Monitoring is 

a critical resource for decision makers who design fuels management programs, however it is an often neglected part of the fuel management cycle.

A commitment to monitoring can lead to more effective and efficient fuels management programs. Clear and focused monitoring objectives ensure that investments in 

monitoring produce useful and timely information that can improve the effectiveness 

and efficiency of fuels management efforts.

Monitoring information can be used to:

• Review the efficacy and cost effectiveness of a treatment program or identify beneficial modifications to particular prescriptions.

• Effectively communicate with stakeholders and resource staff about desired forest 

conditions resulting from thoughtfully designed management.

• Establish a baseline against which treated stands can be compared when assessing 

forest conditions before and after treatment.

• Provide information on what is likely to happen when wildfire moves into a treated stand.

• Adequate monitoring can also help answer questions such as: How do the parameters for a prescribed fire (for example, duff moister content and wind speed) influence fuel consumption for a particular kind of forest structure and topographic 

setting?

Developing a Monitoring Plan

Using targeted questions to guide monitoring can aid in formulating a customized, 

relevant, concise and achievable monitoring plan. By focusing on addressing a few key 

questions, it ensures that the right information is collected to efficiently address specific 

objectives. Jain and others (2012) provide detail concerning each of these questions that 

can be used to develop an effective monitoring plan.

1. What are the project objectives and goals?

2. How will the monitoring information be used to adapt future prescriptions 

so that they are more successful? How will monitoring information obtained 

after a disturbance such as a wildfire be used to guide future management 

activities?

3. What will be monitored?

4. How much will monitoring cost, and who will pay?

5. How will monitoring be accomplished?

6. Who will do the monitoring?

7. When and where does the monitoring need to occur?

8. Where will monitoring data be stored, archived, and documented?

9. How, when, and by whom will the monitoring data be analyzed?

United States

Department

of Agriculture

Forest Service

Rocky Mountain

Research Station

Research Note

RMRS-RN-63

April 2014
Citation

Jain, Theresa B.; Battaglia, Mike A.; Han, Han-Sup; Graham, Russell T.; 

Keyes, Christopher R.; Fried, Jeremy S.; Sandquist, Jonathan E. 2014. A 

comprehensive guide to fuel management practices for dry mixed conifer 

forests in the northwestern United States: Monitoring. Res. Note RMRSRN-63. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 

Rocky Mountain Research Station. 2 p. 

Monitoring Phases

There are essentially three phases of fuels management 

outcomes: short term, medium-and long-term. Short-term 

monitoring addresses the immediate results of a treatment 

in terms of the properties of the stand it leaves behind, while 

longer-term monitoring can provide information about the 

effectiveness of fuel treatments to reduce the incidence of 

large fires by providing suppression opportunities or enhance forest resiliency.

Short-term Monitoring: Shortly after a fuel treatment, decision makers and forest managers may want to know how a 

fuel treatment performed at a local or stand scale. Questions 

may include:

• Did the project meet the objectives such as:

o Were surface fuels altered sufficiently to meet the 

objectives?

o Was canopy base height elevated to the level called 

for in the objectives?

o Were ladder fuels removed?

Medium- and Long-term Monitoring: Although the full 

benefits of longer-term monitoring may be years down the 

road, it is a critical component of fuel management. Monitoring questions may ask: How did fuel treatments perform 

when there is a fire? Do they slow fire growth sufficiently to 

make large fires less common? Do they change fire behavior 

in a way that reduces threats to people and property? Longer 

term questions include: Which treatments produce forests 

that are more resilient to fire and other disturbance agents? 

How do treatments affect carbon storage and emissions, with 

and without subsequent wildfire?

Non-statistical surveys are no substitute for thoughtful, carefully planned monitoring. Although anecdotal evidence can 

provide some useful information, the full power of monitoring data requires a sizable store of statistically representative monitoring data that can control for sources of variation 

such as stand structure, type of treatment, and fire weather. 

The variability in our forests (structure and topography), 

and in the fire weather that controls fire behavior, generates 

the need for large samples to achieve statistically significant 

findings. Even over a 5- to 10-year career of a fuels manager, 

it would not be typical for more than a handful of treatments 

with which the manager was involved to be encountered by 

fire, and the sample would probably not be large enough to 

support generalization of the findings. Carefully planned, 

consistently implemented, and adequately funded (over the 

long-term) monitoring improves the effectiveness and efficiency of the fuels management effort.

Source

Jain, Theresa B.; Battaglia, Mike A.; Han, Han-Sup; Graham, 

Russell T.; Keyes, Christopher R.; Fried, Jeremy S.; Sandquist, 

Jonathan E. 2012. A comprehensive guide to fuel management 

practices for dry mixed conifer forests in the northwestern 

United States. Chapter 10. Gen. Tech. Rep. RMRS-GTR-292. 

Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. 331 p. Available online at www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/42150 [2012]. For a hard 

copy, contact Theresa Jain at tjain@fs.fed.us.