Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded project protects lives and infrastructure in rural Alaskan community 

A fire ecologist sets up terrestrial lidar scanning equipment at a monitoring site

Jennifer McMillan, NPS

The remote community of McCarthy, Alaska is surrounded by boreal forest within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in south-central Alaska. In 2011, the National Park Service (NPS), in cooperation with the State of Alaska, conducted a 36-acre fuels treatment project that included cutting or trimming trees, creating burn piles, and more, to help protect the surrounding communities from fire. The McCarthy University Subdivision Hazard Fuels Reduction project was designed to aid in the protection of infrastructure and human lives in the event of a wildfire near the community. This project created a shaded fuel break - an area of land treated and changed to help stop or slow the spread of a fire - between NPS land and private property in the University Subdivision area. Alaska regional fire ecologists designed a monitoring study to evaluate treatment success in meeting objectives, post-treatment changes in potential fire behavior and to assess re-treatment needs.

With the fuel break now over a decade old, NPS fire managers were interested to know if the fuels treatment was still effective. In 2022, NPS regional fire ecologists and Denali National Park fire effects monitors went back to the field, marking the third monitoring visit since the fuel treatment occurred in 2011. Monitoring data has been recorded at 27 plots starting early summer 2011, just prior to the shaded fuel break implementation that summer, and repeated in 2012, 2016, and most recently, 2022.

In 2022, park staff took 3D Terrestrial Lidar Scans (TLS), a new monitoring technology built to provide a more detailed and accurate picture, at each plot to assess forest structure including tree heights, density, canopy base heights and vegetation cover. Data collected through previous monitoring efforts will be used to help interpret changes and observations relative to the new data presented from the scans.

Preliminary data and observations from the 2022 fieldwork indicate that most of this area needs to be re-treated. NPS plans to re-treat the shaded fuel break in 2023. Small spruce trees that were originally uncut have grown, and areas where decadent willow shrubs were cut in 2011 are now head high. The original treatment plan was to prevent trees uprooting from the wind by initially thinning trees less and slowly thinning more trees later. This plan worked in most places, except where large aspen trees were left remaining. A windstorm caused many of these trees to fall.

Monitoring fuels treatment over time provides fire managers information they need to plan and implement fuels treatments. The 2022 monitoring of this fuels treatment in McCarthy was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for $10,000.00.

A monitoring plot, shown pre-treatment.

NPS

Left image
The same monitoring plot as above, shown one year after cutting.
Credit: NPS

Right image
The same monitoring plot as above, shown 11 years after cutting.
Credit: NPS