57 Wildfire Research Stations Are Closing. Here's What It Means for Your Home.

The U.S. Forest Service is shuttering 57 of 77 research facilities that study wildfire behaviour, drought, and forest management. With the science infrastructure shrinking, individual property protection has never been more important.

On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a sweeping reorganisation of the U.S. Forest Service. Among the changes: 57 of the agency's 77 research facilities across 31 states will be closed. The remaining research capacity will be consolidated into a single centralized office in Fort Collins, Colorado. The agency's headquarters is also moving from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah.

What's Actually Happening

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forest and grassland across 43 states. Its research division — established in 1915 — operates field stations at universities, experimental forests, and laboratories where scientists study how wildfires spread, how forests recover, how drought and pests affect tree health, and how climate change is altering fire behaviour across different ecosystems.

Under the reorganisation, those 57 stations will close. Six in California. Five in Mississippi. Four in Michigan. Three in Utah. The Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland — founded in 1925 with 246 employees, most of them scientists — is among the closures. Approximately 1,500 Forest Service scientists are affected, and employees report confusion about whether their research will continue to be funded or where they would be asked to relocate.

Forest Service Chief Thomas Schultz stated that the consolidation 'does not mean a retreat from the agency's research mission' and is about 'organizing the research enterprise more efficiently, not diminishing it.' But current employees tell a different story. One senior scientist told reporters they had no clarity on whether their work would be funded. Another said research into ecological and climate stressors is being downplayed, with established disciplines being lumped into a generic 'forest management' category.

— Kevin Hood, Executive Director, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics

The Precedent Is Not Encouraging

This is not the first time a federal land management agency has been reorganised through relocation. In 2019, the Bureau of Land Management's headquarters was moved from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado. The result: more than 87% of the main office's employees resigned rather than relocate. The Biden administration reversed the move in 2021, but by then most of the institutional knowledge had walked out the door.

Forest Service employees expect a similar outcome. Scientists with decades of experience studying specific forest ecosystems — acid rain impacts in the Northeast, fire behaviour in the Pacific Northwest, drought patterns in the Southwest — will leave rather than uproot their lives and labs. That knowledge does not transfer to a centralized office. It simply disappears.

Why This Matters for Wildfire Season 2026

This announcement comes as much of the Western United States faces record temperatures and prolonged drought heading into summer. The research stations being closed are the same ones that produce the science used to predict fire behaviour, assess community risk, develop fuel management strategies, and evaluate whether prevention programs are actually working.

As PEER noted in their response, the administration did not inventory the scientific research needs of the National Forest System before announcing the consolidation. There was no assessment of which research programs are critical, which ecosystems require ongoing monitoring, or which projects are mid-stream and would be lost.

The practical consequence is straightforward: communities in wildfire-prone areas will have less publicly funded science informing their protection. Fewer researchers will be studying local fire behaviour. Fewer models will be built. Fewer policy recommendations will be published. The knowledge gap will widen exactly when the risk is accelerating.

What This Means for Homeowners

This is a pattern we have documented before. After the 2025 LA wildfires, the Independent Institute's retrospective showed that every external system meant to protect homeowners — fire services, water infrastructure, insurance, utility oversight — either failed or was overwhelmed. The closure of wildfire research stations adds another layer to that same pattern: the public infrastructure that is supposed to understand and mitigate wildfire risk is being reduced.

None of this means that wildfire risk is decreasing. Drought is intensifying. Development in the wildland-urban interface continues. Fire seasons are lengthening. What is decreasing is the institutional capacity to study, predict, and advise on those risks.

For homeowners in wildfire-prone areas, the implication is the same conclusion we drew from the LA fires analysis: the protection you can rely on is the protection you control yourself. When public systems are under-resourced — whether that means fire hydrants losing pressure or research stations closing — individual preparedness becomes the primary line of defence.

What You Can Do Right Now