Abstract
Wildfire is a global phenomenon that plays a vital role in regulating and maintaining many natural and human-influenced ecosystems but that also poses considerable risks to human populations and infrastructure. Fire managers are charged with balancing the short-term protection of human assets sensitive to fire exposure against the potential long-term benefits that wildfires can provide to natural systems and wildlife populations. The compressed decision timeframes imposed on fire managers during an incident are often insufficient to fully assess a range of fire management options and their respective implications for public and fire responder safety, attainment of land and resource objectives, and future trajectories of hazard and risk. This paper reviews the role of GIS-based assessment and planning to support operational wildfire management decisions, with a focus on recent and emerging research that pre-identifies anthropogenic and biophysical landscape features that can be leveraged to increase the safety and effectiveness of wildfire management operations. We use a case study from the United States to illustrate the development and application of tools that draw from research generated by the global fire management community.
Highlights
The size and complexity of wildfire management challenges have grown significantly over the past several decades as changes to fuel density and composition, spurred by altered fire regimes, interact with changing climate conditions [1,2,3] and rapid expansion of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) [4,5,6]
For purposesproducts of illustration focus framework: conditional net value change, potential wildfire operational delineations our discussion on three key analytical products that fit into this broader framework: conditional net (PODs), and terrestrial suppression difficulty index delineations
While research and development activities continue to improve the use of GIS integration incorporated into wildland fire management exist in pre-fire risk assessment and planning
Summary
The size and complexity of wildfire management challenges have grown significantly over the past several decades as changes to fuel density and composition, spurred by altered fire regimes, interact with changing climate conditions [1,2,3] and rapid expansion of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) [4,5,6]. We link these technologies to an example spatial fire planning framework that provides broader context for fire management decisions, and introduce a series of newly developed tools to further integrate spatial fire planning and incident management, with specific emphasis on planning for strategic fire use and pre-identification of potential fire control locations and hazardous operational environments for fire responders. These new tools draw from technologies developed by the global fire management community and can be adapted to a variety of management objectives and conditions. The example of an integrated assessment, planning, and response system demonstrated here is designed to better align individual fire management objectives with site-specific, long-term planning goals while improving responder safety and resource use efficiency
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