Evolution of Sagebrush Rangelands in the Western United States

In this article we develop a simulation model for estimating the economic efficiency of fuel treatments and apply it to two sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin of the western United States: Wyoming Sagebrush Steppe and Mountain Big Sagebrush. These two ecosystems face the two most prominent resource management concerns in sagebrush ecosystems relative to wildfire: annual grass invasion and native conifer expansion. Our framework simulates long-run wildfire suppression costs with and without fuel treatments explicitly incorporating ecological dynamics, stochastic wildfire, uncertainty fuel treatment success, and ecological thresholds. Our results indicate that fuel treatment is only economically efficient on the basis of wildfire suppression costs savings when the two ecosystems are in relatively good ecological health. Our approach also allows us to analyze how uncertainty about the location of thresholds between ecological states influences the economic efficiency of fuel treatments, as well as the influence of shorter wildfire return intervals and improved treatment success rates. JEL Classification: Q20, Q51, Q57