Intermountain GIS Conference

A trend of increasing wildfire frequency has necessitated the development of methods toidentify forested areas with heightened fire susceptibility. One specific concern in forested areas is susceptibility to canopy fires due to the presence of ladder fuels. Fuel reductiontreatments that target areas where ladder fuels are present are effective at mitigating canopy fires, but it is difficult to identify where ladder fuels exist within large forests. Past studies have demonstrated lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technology can be used to detect the presence of ladder fuels. This study began with a literature review investigating current lidar applications for ladder fuel identification and subsequently led to the development of a model that quantifies ladder fuel density in forested areas. The model output is a raster image that can be used by land managers to help prioritize fuel load/ladder fuel reduction treatments. The accuracy of the model was field validated in the summer of 2025, demonstrating sites with predicted low estimated ladder fuel density (20%) do indeed exhibit low ladder fuel abundance in the field. Likewise, sites predicted as having high estimated ladder fuel density (66%) exhibited high ladder fuel abundance in the field.