From Data to Decisions: Using co-production and Ecological Site Groups to build State-and-Transition Models for Management in Pinyon-Juniper Ecosystems of the Colorado Plateau

Southern Rockies Fire Science Network, Southwest Fire Science Consortium, Great Basin Fire Science Exchange

February 25, 2026 at 2pm ET

Managing fire and fuels in Colorado Plateau pinyon-juniper woodlands and shrublands remains challenging as land managers navigate complex questions about where treatments will be most effective and what outcomes to expect under different conditions. In this webinar, speakers from Utah Valley University and the U.S. Geological Survey will present outcomes from a Joint Fire Sciences Program project that used a collaborative co-production approach with land managers to develop data-driven State-and-Transition Models for fire-prone Ecological Site Groups in the Upper Colorado River Basin. By integrating 37 years of Landsat imagery with extensive federal monitoring data and new field-collected fuel measurements, the team mapped ecological states through time and quantified how fire severity, drought, and other drivers influence vegetation trajectories across the landscape. The presentation will show how these Ecological Site Group State-and-Transition Models, along with the publicly available datasets and reproducible workflows developed through this project, can inform landscape-scale planning decisions from identifying priority treatment areas to understanding likely post-fire outcomes, supporting more strategic approaches to fire risk reduction, fuels treatments, and post-fire restoration across western rangelands.

Presenter: Tara Bishop, Utah Valley University

Panelists: Mike Duniway and John Severson, U.S. Geological Survey