The CFCN Presents: Branching Out

In 2017, the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute (CFRI) at Colorado State University completed a geospatial database of hazardous fuel reduction and forest management activities conducted across private, local, state, and federally managed lands along the Colorado Front Range on behalf of the Front Range Round Table (FRRT). In 2022, CFRI expanded the data and reporting to the entire state of Colorado, which was published as the Colorado Interagency Fuel Treatment Database (report). Beginning in 2023, CFRI has partnered with the Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS) to leverage the expertise of each organization to create an accessible layer of all-lands forest management activities and update the data into the future. Our intent, and the aspirations of the broader forestry community encouraging this project, is that updating and maintaining basic information about fuels reduction and forest restoration treatments on federal and non-federal lands can help track management activities on a multi-jurisdictional landscape to foster learning and improve forest management outcomes. This dataset will provide managers, communities, and researchers a better understanding of where on the landscape fuel treatments have occurred as well as highlights where minimal forest management has taken place, and the spatial and temporal trends associated with those activities.