USU researchers brief council on wildfire erosion model and downstream risks to fisheries

Utah State University researchers Scott Hoteling and Professor Patrick Belmont presented ongoing work modeling wildfire severity, erosion and sediment transport and discussed implications for Utah's fisheries at the Blue Ribbon meeting.

Belmont described a model that predicts how much erosion a wildfire is likely to produce and how sediment might move through river networks to reservoirs and downstream reaches. He said the model can rank reservoirs and river reaches by relative risk so managers can target fuels treatments and post‑fire restoration where impacts would be greatest.

"We're doing a lot of work predicting... where the hot spots for potential positive impacts versus negative impacts might be," Belmont said, noting that some postfire debris can create habitat while other flows overwhelm streams with sediment.

Council and DWR participants described ongoing work with federal partners on pre‑fire fuels reduction and mechanical treatments (timber removal, prescribed fire and other fuels reduction) and stressed the value of cross-agency planning. Nick Braithway (southern region fisheries biologist) described active projects to protect high-elevation cutthroat waters and asked whether the modeling could help target treatments. Belmont and Hoteling said the model is validated at broad scales and that higher-resolution channel data would improve site‑level predictions.

DWR staff and council members agreed to share maps and coordinate field projects — notably Soapstone Creek restoration and other postfire responses — that could serve as case studies for model validation and to inform future fuels‑reduction prioritization.