Data for National Fire and Fire Surrogate study: environmental effects of alternative fuel reduction treatments

Comprised of 12 sites nationwide, the Fire and Fire Surrogates study (FFS) is a comprehensive interdisciplinary experiment designed to evaluate the economics and ecological consequences of alternative fuel reduction treatments in seasonally dry forests of the United States. The FFS deploys a common experimental design across the 12-site network, with each site consisting of a fully replicated experiment that compares four treatments: an un-manipulated control, prescribed fire, mechanical treatments, and mechanical + fire. Measurements include vegetation (trees, shrubs, grasses, forbs), fuels (forest floor, features of the living vegetation, and dead wood of various sizes), soil properties (chemical and physical properties of the forest floor and mineral soil), wildlife (birds, small mammals, herps), and bark beetles. While the FFS study did have an economics component, these data were not included for several reasons: data were too highly variable, based on market conditions, variability in practices and use of machines, and the extent to which each project was subsidized.
The multivariate information from this experiment was intended to allow managers to better assess how fuel reduction treatments influenced whole systems, and to hopefully lead to a better understanding of the tradeoffs inherent in their decisions. We expected that the multi-site information would help managers to understand when response was general or site-specific. The original 6-year FFS study was designed to elucidate how alternative fuel reduction treatments reduced short-term fire risk, and to understand the magnitude of effects caused by these treatments. To understand changes in fire risk, measurements of the fuel bed and stand structure were needed as well as a wide variety of ecological variables to cover the broad spectrum of values important to managers and to society. The FFS study was the most comprehensive experiment ever attempted in a dry forest setting.
More information about FFS can be found here: https://www.frames.gov/ffs. Original metadata date was 3/16/2016. Minor metadata updates on 12/19/2016 and 09/25/2019.