ANALYSIS OF USDA-FOREST-SERVICE FIRE-RELATED EXPENDITURES 1970-1995 -INTRODUCTION

Fiscal year (FY) 1994 was a banner year for wildfire in our nation's f orests and rangelands. During that year the expenditures for USDA Fore st Service fire management reached a record-breaking total of nearly $ 1 billion, and other agencies saw similar increases. Because of these soaring expenditures and recommendations to address them from the Stra tegic Assessment of Fire Management Report (USDA Forest Service 1995b) , the Fire Economics Assessment Team (FEAT) was chartered in 1995 by F orest Service's Fire and Aviation Management (F&AM) Staff in Washingto n, D.C. FEAT was to review current Forest Service fire management expe nditures and their trends, and identify opportunities to control or re duce them. To accomplish this, FEAT identified expenditures and trends , causal factors driving them, projected future developments, and sugg ested changes to reduce future expenditures. FEAT's report was submitt ed to the Forest Service in September 1995 (Bell and others 1995). Thi s paper summarizes the FEAT Report's fire expenditure data and related analyses, which have been updated to include the 1995 fire season; de scribes procedures used to obtain data, presents summaries of the expe nditures and their trends; and discusses some implications for fire ma nagement.