Decision Support
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Transboundary risk requires collaborative governance that attends to the distribution of power, authority, and capacity across the range of actors relevant to particular fire-prone landscapes. Wildfire is also changing in unprecedented ways and multiple, interacting uncertainties make predicting future wildfires difficult. Anticipatory governance can build our capacity to integrate uncertainty into wildfire decision-making and manage risk in proactive ways. Finally, competing interests and values mean that trade-offs are inherent to the wildfire problem. Risk governance links science and society through deliberative, participatory processes that explicitly navigate tradeoffs and build legitimacy for actions to address wildfire risk. Governance approaches that better target the nature of the wildfire problem will improve our ability to coexist with fire today and in the future.
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Study findings revealed that consistent treatment maintenance, the culture of communication about treatments, local expert knowledge, and unit/team composition are important components of how fuel treatments are evaluated and integrated during incident response.
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In this paper, we seek to address this question based on interviews with leaders engaged in the management of jurisdictionally complex wildfire incidents. We propose a multi-level framework for conceiving co-management as strategic efforts of individual actors to cooperatively manage perceived interdependencies with others through one or more formal or informal institutional arrangements. We then demonstrate the value of the proposed framework in its ability to organize a series of questions for diagnosing co-management situations within the context of jurisdictionally complex wildfires.
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The most stressed recommendation was that “getting the people part right” should be the priority consideration when setting up a CAM project. Actively engaging with communities from the very start is essential for developing practical solutions. Communities need to view the project as being consistent with community values and benefitting those communities. Supporting people with leadership qualities who are passionately supportive of the project is important for converting plans to action. Relationship- and capacity-building efforts that encourage productive interactions are essential for developing working relationships that enable implementation and long-term cooperation. Projects should be structured to take advantage of partners’ particular strengths and available resources; effective and timely actions are achieved most easily at smaller scales but need to be coordinated within the context of larger issues. Great value can be obtained by simply moving away from formal implementation of AM toward actions to improve the management system’s capacity to achieve success. Additional studies of smaller scale projects could provide useful information about effective approaches to capacity building.
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A new Special Section in the journal BioScience provides an in-depth exposition of the Resist-Accept-Direct framework, a new approach to guide natural resource decision making. Articles in the Special Section explore the practical application of the framework, compatibility of existing tools, social barriers and opportunities, and future science needs.
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The threat-based model approach uses simplified ecosystem models to identify and map primary threats and determine potential management interventions. The study team found that the threat-based model supported the findings from the BLM’s land health evaluation for the O’Keeffe allotment. The threat-based model approach offered another line of evidence in assessing upland standards. It also proved to be a valuable tool for communicating with stakeholders, as it provided a spatial depiction of habitat condition and threats through maps and a framework to link threats to management actions. The BLM needs to further apply and study this methodology, but there is potential to use the threat-based model to streamline the land health evaluation process and provide a consistent assessment framework across public and private lands.
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Here, we advance the practice of using satellite-derived maps with four guiding principles designed to increase end user confidence and thereby accessibility of these data for decision-making.
Webinar recordings.
Monday, December 6: Forest and Rangeland Livelihoods
Leveraging demand for renewable energy and innovative bioproducts to facilitate forest restoration, presented by Nate Anderson
What happened to wood products markets in 2020 and 2021 in the United States?, presented by Jeff Prestemon
Managing wolves and livestock on national forests in the West, presented by Susan Charnley
Tuesday, December 7: Protecting Ecosystem Services
Human ecology mapping: Capturing diverse forest benefits and landscape interactions for use in planning and decision-making, presented by Lee Cerveny
What’s a canopy worth? Using i-Tree to understand the value of trees, presented by Alexis Ellis
Agroforestry: Tools for working across the landscape, presented by Gary Bentrup, Kate MacFarland, Matthew Smith, Richard Straight
Wednesday, December 8: Bounty Beneath Our Feet
Why is biochar so important?, presented by Debbie Page-Dumroese
Establishing pollinator habitat in log landings after timber sales begins with restoring the soil, presented by John Kabrick
Soil organic carbon, presented by Andy Coulter and Stephanie Connolly
Thursday, December 9: Urban Interfaces
A shared stewardship approach to wildland fire mitigation in Eastern Oklahoma, presented by Cassandra Johnson Gaither
Urban forestry, presented by Natalie van Doorn
Fire WUI urban communities, presented by Francisco Escobedo
Friday, December 10: Getting Outside
Managing winter recreation and sensitive species on Colorado’s public lands: Do humans and Canada lynx select the same habitat?, presented by Lucretia Olson
Considering the benefits of recreation in program reporting and decision-making, presented by Eric White
Latinix outdoor recreation, presented by Jose Sanchez
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In this study, patterns of wildfire risk were explored from operational relative risk assessments (RRA) completed by land managers on 5087 wildfires from 2010 to 2017 in every geographic area of the USA. The RRA is the formal risk assessment used by land managers to develop strategies on emerging wildfires when concerns and issues related to wildfire management are in real-time. Only 38% of these wildfires were rated as high risk and 28% had high ratings for values at risk. Large regional variations were evident, with the West Coast regions selecting high risk and the South-west and Eastern regions selecting low risk. There were finer-scale influences on perceived risk when summarized on a jurisdictional level. Finally, risk summarized by USA agencies showed that the National Park Service and USDA Forest Service selected high risk less frequently compared with other agencies. By illuminating patterns of risk, this research intends to stimulate examination of the social, cultural, and physiographic factors influencing conceptions of risk.
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The Fireshed Registry is a geospatial dashboard and decision tool built to organize information about wildfire transmission to communities and monitor progress towards risk reduction for communities from management investments. The concept behind the Fireshed Registry is to identify and map the source of risk rather than what is at risk across all lands in the continental United States. While the Fireshed Registry was organized around mapping the source of fire risk to communities, the framework does not preclude the assessment of other resource management priorities and trends such as water, fish and aquatic or wildlife habitat, or recreation. The Fireshed Registry is also a multi-scale decision tool for quantifying, prioritizing, and geospatially displaying wildfire transmission to buildings in adjacent or nearby communities.