"…wildland-urban interface protection… is very much centered on the objectives of protecting people, houses, and communities from burning. And to do that, it requires very specific treatments…in particular, there is absolute need when protecting houses from burning, of treating that area, the yard that is directly around that house."
...there is a very clear distinction between wildland-urban interface treatment and forest restoration.
But there are very specific goals when you want to protect a community—that is, houses and people and development—from the threat of fire, and when you want to implement treatments on the ground in the forest that are going to have effects on the forest structure and function, which is what restoration largely has as its goal. I'm not saying that there is no overlap, and that there isn't also a need to coordinate those different objectives, so that on the landscape scale they do all fit together and complement each other.
However, the basic objectives of those two different ideas are distinct. In particular, wildland-urban interface project, wildland-urban interface treatment, is very much centered on the objectives of protecting people, houses, and communities from burning. And to do that, it requires very specific treatments, of which there are still a range, but the range is very much centered around the communities. In particular, there is absolute need when protecting houses from burning, of treating that area, the yard that is directly around that house.
The number one way to protect the house is to implement treatments that actually protect the house—that is, on the house, in the house, the roof, what's right up against the house, and what's in the yard directly adjacent to that house. And that is just a few hundred feet that we're talking. In some cases, depending on slope, and how much vegetation you have, and what kind of weather patterns you have, it can be anything from less than a hundred feet to a couple hundred feet. And these are not my ideas, these are basically not prescriptions but findings that have come out of research from even the Forest Service's own research division, but also in the fire academics in the West.