Does private forest land management result in higher burn severity from wildfires in timberlands of the Pacific states?

There are many pressing scientific questions surrounding the topic of whether forest management has resulted in higher burn severity from recent wildfires in timberlands of the Pacific states. Using burn severity maps from Landsat satellite imagery, zonal statistics in QGIS were used to summarize and compare the attributes (mean, median, variance, range) of burn severity classes within two zones for each fire: the privately managed forest area and a surrounding control (largely unmanaged forested area). We analyzed 100 individual managed forest areas across the Pacific states with a total of 800 privately owned management units. Comparison of the burned severity class by individual managed forest area showed that 42% of these timberlands burned at significantly lower severity ( p  < 0.05) than their surrounding (unmanaged) buffer zones in large wildfires between 2013 and 2022. In addition, 30% of managed forest lands were not significantly different from their unmanaged buffer zones in burn severity. Landsat normalized difference moisture index (NDMI) clearly shows recent clear-cuts, fire scars, and thinning management in every case we examined, eliminating the possibility of underestimating or overlooking timber management activities in control buffer zones. The highest burn severity did occur in landscapes where extremely high levels of pre-fire live forest biomass remained in large patches around equally large and thinned or logged forest areas. We conclude that this type of mixed-age management plan may create a potentially explosive fuel-loading status in a forest, whereby wildfire can be readily carried by high winds from dense fuel areas (not recently thinned or managed) over and around patches of low biomass stands that have been recently thinned and logged. NB: References will be numbered and cited in order upon acceptance of the paper