Forest fuel treatments are conducted at a stand level in the wildland–urban interface to reduce the potential for catastrophic loss caused by wildfire. Given the considerable expense of conducting motor-manual fuel treatments, fuels managers want to better understand the productivity and cost of commonly applied fuel treatments in order to prescribe cost-effective treatment techniques. Due to the limited data available and the myriad combinations of fuel treatment options and equipment types used in a diverse range of ecosystems, cost projections for fuel treatments are difficult to forecast reliably.
Fuels managers and Wildfire Operations advisory members asked that a simplified data collection protocol be developed to collect more data across a broader range of ecosites. The streamlined and simplified process presented in this document includes a user-friendly format for in-field data collection by field crew supervisors.