Southwest Idaho Landscape Project

The Forest Service has launched a robust, 10-year strategy to squarely address the wildfire crisis in the places where it poses the most immediate threats to communities. The strategy, called “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests,” combines a historic investment of congressional funding with years of scientific research and planning into a national effort that will dramatically increase the scale of forest health treatments over the next decade.

This crisis hits close to home here in Idaho. In 2022, the lightning caused Four Corners fire threatened nearly 600 homes in the community of Cascade. This incident was a “near miss” and if weather conditions over the wildfire would have changed slightly, the outcome could have been much different. The communities near the Boise and Payette National Forests are at great risk to experience a catastrophic wildfire. The Southwest Idaho Landscape Project will focus fuels and forest health treatments more strategically and at the scale of the problem, in an effort to protect these communities.

The Southwest Idaho National Priority Landscape Project (SIL) is one of 10 landscapes selected in this national effort. Encompassing 1.7 million acres, the SIL includes approximately 425,000 and 505,000 acres of the Boise National Forest (BNF) and Payette National Forest (PNF), respectively, and 800,000 acres of other ownership including private, state, and other federal lands.

The SIL is a landscape scale effort to reduce the risk of catastrophic and undesirable wildfire while increasing the resiliency of the landscape to climate change and other stressors. To accomplish this, the strategy is to treat at least 230,000 acres (25%) of hazardous fuels on National Forest System (NFS) lands over the next five to seven years (i.e. 2022-2028).  Treatments on NFS lands in conjunction with efforts to treat adjacent federal, state, and private land through a shared stewardship approach will aid in meeting the primary project objectives of reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire to communities, improving watershed health, sustaining industry, protecting recreation, and improving forest resilience. 

The SIL contains all or portions of fifteen priority firesheds.  The SIL also encompasses one of two Shared Stewardship priority areas in Idaho.

The SIL is adjacent to or includes 14 community cores identified to have elevated risk for transboundary wildfire exposure, following the process documented in  GTR 392  and displayed in the map below. Community cores include Robie Creek, Boise City, Hidden Springs, Horseshoe Bend, Idaho City, Placerville, Garden Valley, Banks, Smiths Ferry, Cascade, Donnelly, Council, Bear, Cuprum, McCall, and New Meadows. 

The map below shows modeled wildfire hazard potential for the Southwest Idaho Landscape (source:  Wildfire Risk to Communities Wildfire Hazard Potential ). Red is very high, orange is high, yellow is moderate, and greens represent low wildfire potential.

We cannot emphasize enough that this strategy represents an all-lands effort. The firesheds we have identified on the Boise and Payette National Forests cover a patchwork of ownership including private and family-owned lands, Tribal ancestral lands, lands managed by the Department of the Interior, state lands under the Idaho Department of Lands and the Idaho Parks & Recreation, as well as National Forest systems lands. As such, private and family-owned lands are an integral part of this strategy and will be critical elements in our landscape-scale planning. Within the SIL, there are about 528,000 acres of private land and about 929,000 acres of National Forest system lands.

Large wildfires and the forest management solutions know no boundaries. The Forest Service will work with all land management agencies and interested private parties to broadly manage forest and fuels across entire landscapes before wildfires occur. Our planning efforts are focused on identifying shared priorities and investing in shared capacity for this work. Under Shared Stewardship, we are working across boundaries toward shared goals to ensure all lands are more continuously managed to promote forest health and safer communities. We will also continue to build on our successes in the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program and on tools and authorities like the Good Neighbor Authority and the Tribal Forest Protection Act. 

Land managers can increase forest resilience and minimize wildfire impacts through forest management activities based on sound science. These activities are called hazardous fuels treatments and forest health treatments because their purpose is to reduce dangerous fuel levels and to restore forests to a more natural state that can sustain itself.

Treatments include Non-Commercial Thinning and Commercial Thinning that focus on removal of trees from overstocked forests. Prescribed burns are designed to mimic the historic and natural fire regime of the forest through controlled, low-intensity burns to clear excess debris from the forest floor.  Reforestation helps to restore stressed or damaged forest to a natural and reproductive state.  These tools when used in precise ways and in targeted areas within the forest will restore forest health and resilience.    

See below for the four main tools the SIL will utilize.

• Move vegetation toward the desired conditions specified in the Forest Plan to provide for ecological processes and resilience to stressors such as unplanned wildfire, climate change, and insect outbreaks.
• Provide for the protection of life, investments, and valuable resources through appropriate vegetation, fuel, and wildfire management.
• Mitigate wildfire threats to communities by creating control features to prepare for restoring more frequent, low-severity fire to the landscape.
• Protect WUI communities from catastrophic fires and create strategic control features to prepare for returning a favorable fire regime to the landscape.
• Protect water quality from deleterious effects of high severity fires.

• Schedule and complete prescribed fires and mechanical treatments.
• Reduce high intensity wildfire potential to enable wildfire response where suppression resources can safely access and anchor their actions with an increased likelihood of success.
• Reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire by modifying fuel accumulation.
• Improve firefighter and public safety by treating fuels that provide access and create and/or maintain a low wildfire hazard in the urban interface.
• Reduce the potential for undesirable effects from wildfire on the landscape.
• Strategically locate treatments in areas to utilize future ignitions to meet resource objectives.
• Restore fire as an ecological process in vegetative communities.
• Improve ecosystem health, wildlife, and pollinator habitat.
• Increase resiliency of existing vegetation communities by modifying stand structure and composition and bring into closer alignment with historical conditions.
• Reduce ladder fuels that provide vertical and horizontal fuel continuity thereby reducing crown fire risk.
• Increase canopy base heights and crown spacing to reduce the risk of crown fire.
• Increase the effectiveness of all wildfire risk reduction actions by working across boundaries with all jurisdictional partners.
• Increase capacity by allowing partners to assist with implementation to achieve shared goals.

It will take a united effort to meet goals and objectives of the SIL. With the help of our partners, the Forests will be working with adjacent federal, state, and private landowners through a shared stewardship approach to protect communities and other important resources such as water supplies and habitats from the effects of catastrophic wildfires.

The  Boise Forest Coalition  and  Payette Forest Coalition  have been instrumental in helping build broad support for active management of this landscape. These coalitions are independent from the Forest Service and their help is needed more than ever to match the pace and scale of forest management needed to address the wildfire crisis in Southwest Idaho.  These coalitions bring interested parties together from across the spectrum of land management perspectives to work together in making recommendations to the Forest Service.  It is this collaborative support that has helped the Forest Service make great strides in getting work done on the ground over the past several years, and their continued involvement will support current and future efforts.  If you are interested in becoming a part of these coalitions, please contact them for additional information.

Success within the SIL will be defined by significantly reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfire to communities and other high value infrastructure across the landscape.   This will be accomplished by reducing tree densities, ladder fuels, and surface fuels allowing fire managers to have greater success suppressing unwanted wildland fire and protecting values-at-risk.  Success in this landscape will be calculated using standard metrics, such as acres treated, through empirical monitoring and analysis, and through modeling pre- and post-treatment outcomes. The goals will have been reached when the landscape is resilient to disturbance, communities and other highly valued infrastructure and resources can be protected from undesirable wildfire, and the communities and stakeholders within the landscape support our management actions and engage by treating their own contributing landscapes.  

The BNF, PNF, and Intermountain Region are still working to determine the best metrics to quantify progress in the SIL.  We are exploring different options to quantify progress towards the following project outcomes/objectives:

• Increase ability to control fire spread.
• Reduce potential for undesirable fire effects in Ponderosa Pine.
• Reduce potential fire size and severity.
• Reduce pathways for fires to reach communities.
• Reduce wildfire risk to assets.
• Reduce wildfire risk to ecosystems.
• Reduce wildfire risk to watersheds and water quality.