Abstract
Fire management in protected areas faces mounting obstacles as climate change alters disturbance regimes, resources are diverted to fighting wildfires, and more people live along the boundaries of parks. Evidence-based prescribed fire management and improved communication with stakeholders is vital to reducing fire risk while maintaining public trust. Numerous national fire databases document when and where natural, prescribed, and human-caused fires have occurred on public lands in the United States. However, these databases are incongruous and non-standardized, making it difficult to visualize spatiotemporal patterns of fire and engage stakeholders in decision-making. We created interactive decision analytics (“VISTAFiRe”) that transform fire history data into clear visualizations of the spatial and temporal dimensions of fire and its management. We demonstrate the utility of our approach using Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park as examples of protected areas experiencing fire regime change between 1980 and 2017. Our open source visualizations may be applied to any data from the National Park Service Wildland Fire Events Geodatabase, with flexibility to communicate shifts in fire regimes over time, such as the type of ignition, duration and magnitude, and changes in seasonal occurrence. Application of the tool to Everglades and Big Cypress revealed that natural wildfires are occurring earlier in the wildfire season, while human-caused and prescribed wildfires are becoming less and more common, respectively. These new avenues of stakeholder communication are allowing the National Park Service to devise research plans to prepare for environmental change, guide resource allocation, and support decision-making in a clear and timely manner.
Highlights
The compounding effects of climate change, expanding human development, and limited public funding have significant implications for fire management on public lands and protected areas [1,2,3,4,5]
Urbanization, sprawl [4], and amenity-driven development [7] has increased the area of the wildland–urban interface (WUI) around public lands [8], which has had drastic impacts on some fire regimes [9]
WUI can be difficult and expensive to protect from wildfires [10]
Summary
The compounding effects of climate change, expanding human development, and limited public funding have significant implications for fire management on public lands and protected areas [1,2,3,4,5]. We visualized Everglades and Big Cypress fires by ignition source (human-caused, natural, and prescribed), date, and size, as well as plotted their
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