A collaborative, cloud-based decision support system for structured wildfire risk mitigation planning

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Beginning in the 2010s, structured wildfire risk assessment tools were developed to provide a framework for prioritizing management actions based on wildfire hazard, ecological response, and decision-maker values. Yet, more than a decade later, operationalizing risk assessments remains challenging and limited by disconnected tooling, static data, and workflows that are difficult to scale or adapt for collaborative decision-making. Here, we present the Vibrant Planet Platform (VPP), a modular, cloud-based decision-support system that integrates fire simulation, ecological response functions, multi-objective optimization, and user input into a unified planning environment. The platform enables risk-based scenario planning across landscapes up to millions of hectares by linking validated modeling tools (e.g., FSim, FVS, ForSys) with high-resolution, up-to-date vegetation and infrastructure data. We describe the challenges inherent to operationalizing risk assessments, demonstrate how VPP addresses them through architectural and methodological design, and highlight real-world deployments in U.S. risk-exposed landscapes and communities. We outline a multi-tiered validation framework for assessing model relevance, internal coherence, predictive performance, and field alignment. VPP illustrates how structured decision-making can be operationalized at broad scales, offering a model for ecological planning tools that are rigorous, transparent, and participatory.