Treatment Effectiveness: Lessons from ReSHAPE

Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory

Thursday, March 19 - 1pm ET

Presenters: Anson Call, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, Colorado State University and Nathan Tomczyk, New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, New Mexico Highlands University

The ReSHAPE program is a major new effort to compile and collate fuel treatment data from federal and state agencies across the United States. What do these data say about treatment effects on wildfires? Are the treatments working? What does "working" even mean? And importantly, how can we move beyond "associated with" statements to "caused by" statements when randomized experiments are impossible? This talk will address all of these questions and more, and (hopefully) demystify some of the statistics behind this work.