Seattle's Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab — the US Forest Service research station behind the real-time smoke forecasting map used by governments, firefighting teams and popular air quality apps — is slated for closure under the Trump administration's reorganization of the agency, NPR reported Friday, just as forecasters warn the West could face an epic summer of wildfires and smoke.

The lab appears on a list of 56 of the agency's 90 research stations identified for closure as part of a restructuring that would also relocate the Forest Service's headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, consolidate its research arm in Fort Collins, Colorado, and fold regional offices into state-level facilities.

The smoke map at the center of the lab's work was built with researchers at the University of Washington and updates in real time, showing where smoke is, where it is forecast to drift and the harmful particulates it carries. 'If someone is living in Ruidoso, New Mexico, they can go and see where the smoke is going to,' said Ernesto Alvarado, a fire ecologist at UW who works with the lab. 'We have a wildfire crisis in the West.'

Alvarado says the tool reflects decades of accumulated institutional knowledge — the kind a university grant cycle cannot replicate. 'You are integrating the knowledge and the science available for decades by one team, in Seattle,' he said.

The administration's budget proposal goes further than consolidation: it asks Congress to terminate the Forest Service's forest and rangeland research entirely, shifting the work to universities and the private sector. The agency has already lost thousands of staff to layoffs, buyouts and early retirements since last year.

Morgan Varner, a fire behavior scientist who worked at the Seattle lab until 2019, called the process haphazard and doubted staff would relocate. 'People may think they're sort of backwoods out measuring some trees — but this is a lab working with the brightest minds that are based in Seattle,' he said. When the Bureau of Land Management moved its headquarters west in 2019, the vast majority of affected employees left rather than move.

In Washington state, researchers say the agency has gone quiet about the plan's progress — leaving universities, rural fire districts and smoke forecasters unsure whether the systems they rely on will exist by the peak of this fire season.