Abstract
Wildland fire managers are increasingly embracing risk management principles by being more anticipatory, proactive, and “engaging the fire before it starts”. This entails investing in pre-season, cross-boundary, strategic fire response planning with partners and stakeholders to build a shared understanding of wildfire risks and management opportunities. A key innovation in planning is the development of potential operational delineations (PODs), i.e., spatial management units whose boundaries are relevant to fire containment operations (e.g., roads, ridgetops, and fuel transitions), and within which potential fire consequences, suppression opportunities/challenges, and strategic response objectives can be analyzed to inform fire management decision making. As of the summer of 2020, PODs have been developed on more than forty landscapes encompassing National Forest System lands across the western USA, providing utility for planning, communication, mitigation prioritization, and incident response strategy development. Here, we review development of a decision support tool—a POD Atlas—intended to facilitate cross-boundary, collaborative strategic wildfire planning and management by providing high-resolution information on landscape conditions, values at risk, and fire management resource needs for individual PODs. With the atlas, users can rapidly access and assimilate multiple forms of pre-loaded data and analytics in a customizable manner. We prototyped and operationalized this tool in concert with, and for use by, fire managers on several National Forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains of the USA. We present examples, discuss real-world use cases, and highlight opportunities for continued decision support improvement.
Highlights
Management of wildland fire in the western USA and globally continues to increase in complexity due to a multitude of factors, including increased fire activity and lengthened fire seasons due to climate change [1,2,3], increased demands for fire suppression and structure protection due to expansion of the wildland–urban interface [4,5], and elevated safety risks and suppression difficulty due to increases in tree mortality from fire and other disturbances [6,7,8,9]
Optimal response strategies based on a risk analysis completed with key stakeholders and partner agencies [13]. Fundamental aims of such pre-season planning are dampening time pressures, reducing uncertainties, expanding decision space, and clarifying risk–risk tradeoffs associated with incident response, to help managers arrive at high-quality response decisions consistent with broader land and resource management objectives [14,15,16]
Despite the proliferation of risk-based information, its use in fire management and decision support remains limited in part due to the lack of attention paid towards engineering the delivery and communication of this information to key users and decision makers [43,44]
Summary
Management of wildland fire in the western USA and globally continues to increase in complexity due to a multitude of factors, including increased fire activity and lengthened fire seasons due to climate change [1,2,3], increased demands for fire suppression and structure protection due to expansion of the wildland–urban interface [4,5], and elevated safety risks and suppression difficulty due to increases in tree mortality from fire and other disturbances [6,7,8,9] To address these challenges, wildland fire managers are increasingly embracing risk management principles by being more anticipatory, proactive, and “engaging the fire before it starts” [10,11,12]. Use of PODs as a cross-boundary planning tool is consistent with the “all hands, all lands” emphasis and the risk science underpinning the National Cohesive Wildland fire Management Strategy in the USA [56]
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