So far this year, there have been well over 200 wildfires in Utah, most of them small fires and 95 percent of them caused by humans.
Wildland Management Professor Jim Lutz, and a team from Utah State University’s Forestry Institute, is on a quest to create the state’s first fire atlas as an aid in managing these fires.
“What we mean by an atlas is understanding the parts of Utah that have burned within the last 30 years and more than just whether they burned, but how severe they’ve burned,” Dr. Lutz said. “So, if we look at a fire of a given size it can have beneficial effects and it can also have effects that are not so good. And a lot of that depends on the actual severity and the pattern of severity within fires.”
Dr. Lutz said they want to understand how that plays out at all of Utah’s unique fire sites.