The US Forest Service will close 57 of its 77 research facilities across 31 states and consolidate its national research division into a single office in Fort Collins, Colorado, stripping wildfire science capacity from the western United States ahead of a fire season already running well above average. That is according to a New York Times investigation, which builds on the March 31 reorganisation announcement by Thomas M. Schultz Jr., the 21st Chief of the US Forest Service.
Wood Central understands the closures form the science arm of a broader restructure that also moves Forest Service headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, affecting 260 employees, with as many as 5,000 staff in line for relocation across the agency’s 193-million-acre estate. The full overhaul is the most significant change to the Forest Service since 1905, as Wood Central first reported when Schultz announced the headquarters move.
The Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, which issues the wildfire smoke forecasts the Pacific Northwest relies on through fire season, sits on the closure list. The Bozeman Forestry Research Station in Montana, with six employees, is also slated to close, as is Vermont’s Burlington station, which has tracked the effects of acid rain on hardwood species and the New England maple syrup industry for decades.
More than a dozen facilities have been spared, including two laboratories that focus on wildfire and on developing forest products such as fuel and composite wood, with the surviving network anchored on the Fort Collins centre and the agency’s new Salt Lake City headquarters. No research facility will remain in Alaska, despite the state hosting nine million hectares of national forest, the largest tract under Forest Service jurisdiction.
Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, told the New York Times the consolidation would split land management from the science on which it has historically rested. “This move will lead to an increasing divergence between sound science and land management,” Hood said.
Ann Bartuska, the former USDA Undersecretary for Research who oversaw Forest Service science before her retirement, separately told Science magazine that congressional pushback was likely from delegations in states whose research funding will be redirected to Fort Collins. Bartuska also flagged uncertainty over the agency’s 82 experimental forests, the long-running outdoor research sites where decades-long datasets cannot be picked up and relocated, even if the scientists running them can.
It comes as Wood Central reported the restructure replaces nine regional offices with 15 state-based directorates in the West, with the consolidation announced after the agency processed more than 46,000 public comments on the proposed reorganisation. The science element is the most contested in the wider package, with conservation groups arguing the cuts target studies likely to expose the environmental costs of expanded logging on federal land.
Schultz has cast the science consolidation as part of a wider pivot toward active forest management, fire management, minerals and recreation, with Fort Collins to direct research priorities across an estate where almost two-thirds of the 193-million-acre system is at risk from wildfire, insects or disease. The agency is also targeting 4 billion board feet in annual timber harvests by fiscal year 2028, up from 2.9 billion board feet cut in 2023.
With the Fort Collins consolidation now locked in and the first wildfire season under the new structure weeks away, Schultz’s 5,000-staff relocation plan will be tested against a 2026 fire year that has already produced more than 16,000 wildfires — and against the loss of three-quarters of the agency’s century-old research network.
