Fire lines adjacent to aspen are unlikely to hold during extreme burning conditions in southern Rocky Mountain forests

Increases in area of extent, severity, and frequency of wildfires across the western United States are presenting challenges to socio-ecological systems, including shifts to alternative ecological states, loss of homes, and compromising human health. Wildfire suppression operations, such as constructing hand lines to limit the spread of fire, are an important part of wildland fire management, particularly in the wildland urban interface. Like other attributes of wildland fire activity and effects, suppression strategies and their effectiveness vary with ecological, topographic, climatological, and sociopolitical factors. However, there has been little research that examines the efficacy of suppression operations, specifically as they relate to forest composition. Here, we ask about the effectiveness of fire line construction based on adjacent stand composition. Specifically, we ask: (1) Are wildfire suppression lines preferentially constructed in stands with specific tree species? (2) How does species identity influence the probability that suppression lines hold when also considering differences in topography, climate, and extreme fire weather? We anticipated that suppression operations will be biased towards-and more effective in-stands with quaking aspen because they are often associated with less extreme fire behavior than many conifer species. We conducted our study in the southern Rocky Mountain ecoregion using fires (n = 36) that burned during 2019-2023 and included records of fire suppression operations (n = 4295). We used nonparametric statistical models to elucidate biases in the construction of fire lines and the effects of stand composition. We found quaking aspen was the least common tree species to be within fire footprints, yet fire lines were placed near quaking aspen 1.68-5.30 times more than commonly co-occurring tree species. Fire growth, independent of stand composition, was the most important predictor for whether fire suppression lines were likely to hold but the percentage of fire lines that held differed between fires >40,500 ha and smaller events (65% vs. 82%, respectively). This research suggests that wildland firefighters preferentially located fire lines near aspen stands, perhaps due to the long-held notion that aspen stands are less flammable. However, during extreme burning conditions fire lines are unlikely to hold regardless of stand composition.