A Decision Support System for Evaluating Wildland Fire Danger and Prioritizing Vegetation and Fuels Treatments

Paul F. Hessburg, Keith M. Reynolds, Robert E. Keane, Kevin M. James and R. Brion Salter

USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station (1,2,4,5) and Rocky Mountain Research Station (3)

Wildland fuels have been accumulating in western forests of the United States (US) for at least the past 70 years due to 20^th century settlement and management activities, and changing climatic conditions. As demonstrated by recent wildland fires, additional fuels are contributing to more intense fire behavior and increasing fire resistance to containment and control. Consequently, property and natural resources have been destroyed, costs of fire management have escalated, fire-dependent forest and rangeland ecosystems have deteriorated, and risks to human life and property continue to escalate.

Historically, fires of varying size, frequency, and intensity maintained spatial patterns of forest vegetation, as well as temporal variation in those patterns. In fact, many agents interacted to shape vegetation patterns and their spatio-temporal variation, including forest insect outbreaks, forest diseases, fires, weather and longer term climate events, and intentional aboriginal burning. The result was characteristic landscape patterns and variation in forest structural attributes, species composition, and habitats that resonated with the dominant disturbance processes.

Circumstances are quite different today. Human and climatic influences have created anomalous vegetation patterns, and these patterns support fire, insect, and disease processes that display uncharacteristic duration, spatial extent, and intensity. In this paper, we present a decision-support system for evaluating existing vegetation and fuel conditions and potential fire impacts, and for prioritizing subwatersheds for vegetation and fuel treatment. Fire danger is evaluated as a function of three primary topics: fire vulnerability, potential wildfire severity, and risk of ignition. Each primary topic has secondary topics under which data are evaluated. We demonstrate use of the application with an example from the Rocky Mountain region in the State of Utah (map zone 16), which represents a planning area of about 4.8 million ha and encompasses 575 complete subwatersheds. We also discuss considerations for extending the application to support strategic planning at national (that is, across all 66 map zones of the US), regional (within a map zone or region), and local (within individual subwatersheds of a map zone or region) scales.

Wednesday Morning Plenary

corresponding author:

Paul F. Hessburg
USDA Forest Service
Pacific Northwest Research Station
1133 N. Western Avenue
Wenatchee, WA 98801
phessburg@fs.fed.us.