The US Forest Service and other land-management agencies seek better tools for anticipating future expenditures for wildfire suppression. We developed regression models for forecasting US Forest Service suppression spending at 1-, 2-, and 3-year lead times. We compared these models to another readily available forecast model, the 10-year moving average model, and found that the regression models do a better job of forecasting...

Large wildland fires are complex, costly events influenced by a vast array of physical, climatic, and social factors. Changing climate, fuel buildup due to past suppression, and increasing populations in the wildland-urban interface have all been blamed for the extreme fire seasons and rising suppression expenditures of recent years. With each high-cost year comes a multitude of fire cost reviews, suppression cost studies by f...

This examination of milling capacity and timber use in the western United States summarizes changes in the region’s wood products industry and its ability to use trees of various sizes. Between 1986 and 2003, total timber-processing capacity in the West (excluding pulpwood and fuelwood) declined from 5.0 to 3.2 billion cubic feet annually, and capacity utilization decreased from 3.6 to 2.5 billion cubic feet. During 2003, 2.2...