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The Economics Of Fuel Management: Wildfire, Invasive Plants, And The Dynamics Of Sagebrush Rangelands In The Western United States, Michael H. Taylor, Kimberly Rollins, Mimako Kobayashi, Robin J. Tausch

Articles

In this article we develop a simulation model to evaluate the economic efficiency of fuel treatments and apply it to two sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin of the western United States: the Wyoming Sagebrush Steppe and Mountain Big Sagebrush ecosystems. These ecosystems face the two most prominent concerns in sagebrush ecosystems relative to wildfire: annual grass invasion and native conifer expansion. Our model simulates long-run wildfire suppression costs with and without fuel treatments explicitly incorporating ecological dynamics, stochastic wildfire, uncertain fuel treatment success, and ecological thresholds. Our results indicate that, on the basis of wildfire suppression costs savings, fuel …