4. Discussion
The seven scenarios presented above address a wide
spectrum of management intensities ranging from no
treatment to various degrees of thinning and prescribed
burning to total treatment at the landscape
scale. The ®re risk for the landscape decreases steadily
as the intensity of management increases. The no
treatment scenario has nearly 30% of the landscape
in high-risk categories (6 and 7) by the ®fth decade,
whereas the intensive treatment of all stands has 100%
of the landscape in the low-risk categories (1 and 2) by
the ®fth decade. The light and middle thinning treatments
have decreasing proportions of the landscape in
high-risk categories and increasing proportions in
low-risk categories. In contrast to the landscape-scale
®re risk, the stand-scale risk of speci®c reserve stands
identi®ed for protection either does not change with
increasing severity of thinning treatment (stands B and
C) or changes only slightly (stand A). Thinning with
prescribed burning of non-reserve stands provides a
moderate reduction of both landscape and individual
reserve stand risk. The intensive thinning treatment
and prescribed burning in focus stands scenarios both
dramatically reduce ®re risk in each of the reserve
stands, but at the cost of altering the reserve stand
structures through manipulations, a consequence
which may be incompatible with the goal of conserving
late-successional habitat.