Utah has a unique mix of scrub brush, desert and forest landscapes that makes it different from most other western states.
That means wildfires don’t act the same way here as they do elsewhere, said Utah State University wildland resources professor Jim Lutz. Yet, a lot of past fire ecology research has traditionally come from states like California or Arizona.
That’s why he put together a study that sorted through four decades of satellite imagery and wildfire reports to help Utah fire managers weigh their options for controlling a fire or letting it burn.
“It's not like we're in northern Arizona and we have 10,000 acres of Ponderosa pine burn,” he said. “The science of fire and management actions we might decide to take or not are just a little different in forest types like Utah has.”
So, what makes the landscape different?
For starters, much of Utah’s forested land is not contiguous — meaning it is broken up by valleys — which could reduce the risk of megafires, he said. And the places that do have larger continuous forest cover are at higher elevations where the winters are wetter.
Utah’s plant life also tends to produce less fuel for wildfires than other parts of the West, he said. Ecosystems on the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, for instance, constantly produce pine needles, branches and small trees that can build up and make fires burn stronger. Much of Utah’s vegetation, from forests to grasslands, isn’t that productive.
“That's not to say that we're out of the woods,” he said. “If we get one of those weather patterns where it's dry and windy for about two weeks, just about any place in Utah will burn.”
Understanding Utah’s unique dynamics matter, he said, because fire managers have a tough job. Beyond considering the safety of firefighters and nearby residents, they also have to weigh the environmental impact a fire might have.
Allowing smaller fires to burn, rather than immediately extinguishing them, can be beneficial to the ecosystem, he said. This data could help show what the landscape could look like after a blaze and whether or not a fire might leave the habitat in better shape.
In a grassland or sagebrush area, for example, plants might grow back quickly. In a high-elevation, low-productivity forest, repopulation could take decades.
Losing too many trees in a fire can also have ramifications beyond the forest, he said. Disrupting the way their roots hold soil could lead to erosion, and the loss of shade might cause mountain snowpack to melt all at once, threatening communities’ ability to use that water as it runs downstream.
Paula Imlay, a fire prevention specialist with Utah Forestry, Fire and State Lands based in Cedar City, said local managers already know their landscapes well. But studies like this one could help them better prepare for wildfires and know what to do when blazes start.
“The more information the better when it comes to wildfire, because nobody's ever going to really understand or know how to prevent it 100%.”
When a fire pops up, she said they have three basic options. They can try to put it out completely. They can try to confine it to a specific area. Or they can manage the fire, letting it burn away from people and property as part of the ecological cycle.
On state land, the decision is often made for them, she said. If a fire is human-caused, for example, the state will always put it out. A lot of state-managed land is also located close to homes in the wildland-urban interface, which means there are fewer opportunities for managers to let natural-caused fires burn safely.
These decisions often become even more complicated, she said, because so many different managers — such as the state, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service or the Bureau of Indian Affairs — might need to be involved, depending on where the fire spreads.
“Utah is so complex with the different agencies that have land,” she said, “a lot comes into play when they decide to manage it.”
Lutz hopes this research can help more people view wildfire as a nuanced part of our environment, rather than a danger that’s always bad.
Still, decades of suppressing wildfires has allowed fuel to pile up higher than we’d otherwise see, he said. And paired with years of megadrought and aridification in the West, that creates a dangerous recipe that could allow Utah’s wildfire numbers to creep up in the future.
“We've got more fuel and it's drier. Those are not things that make your fire smaller.”
