No abstract

Land managers face a complex set of choices when developing restoration and management strategies to promote resilient landscapes. Restoring landscapes is costly; making full restoration beyond the means of most land management agencies. This necessitates difficult choices and a careful consideration of which areas of the landscapes to restore and how intensively they should be restored to achieve the greatest net benefit. We define the problem in the context of derived demand where optimal restoration is derived from the value to the ecosystem or landscape. The derived demand framework enables us to closely integrate economics with ecological principles of restoration and resiliency to arrive at cost effective solutions. We develop the economic framework for identifying and selecting the most advantageous sites to restore given a fixed restoration budget. This framework informs and guides budget allocations across market and nonmarket goods and services to optimally restore the natural capital. The theoretical development is demonstrated with a case study showing the value added achieved from introducing a restoration management effort (fuel treatment) at Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park in the United States.

In approaches that were previously used, preparedness planning used tactical modelling of individual fire events and resource deployment. Results from modelling individual fire events were typically gathered to construct a program analysis at the planning unit or at the landscape level. This research deviates from those tactical-based approaches by using strategic modelling to inform planning and budgeting decisions for a preparedness program. In preparedness planning and budgeting, wildland fire officials must consider the dual importance of reducing wildfire risk to highly valued resources (initial attack) and managing for the beneficial effects of wildland fire that can foster resilient fire-adapted ecosystems. This dual purpose requires the employment of a similar set of resources including crews, equipment and planning. Consequently, we address the allocation of a single 'preparedness' budget to the dual purpose of initial attack and beneficial wildland fire (BWF) using return on investment (ROI) as the performance metric.

Wildland fire is an important natural disturbance that plays a key role in influencing the forest ecosystem conditions across the western US. Large and detrimental wildland fires can cause a threat to communities, infrastructures, timber production, recreation opportunities, wildlife habitat and sustainable ecosystem development efforts. Fuel treatment and wildland fire preparedness are two important strategic wildland fire planning programs for the US National Park Service (NPS). The goal of the programs is to mitigate the detrimental effects of wildland fires while promoting their beneficial effects in maintaining and restoring ecosystem conditions. NPS fire planners are tasked with efficiently allocating these fire program budgets to each of the parks. To help inform these decisions a set of production functions were applied to park specific data to describe the return on investments (ROI) at each park for the fuel treatment and preparedness programs. For each park, we calculated the first-order gradients of ROI at pre-selected investment combinations to quantify the marginal returns of investment (MROI) from both management programs. Budget allocation decisions were made by comparing MROI from both programs for all parks in a region. We iteratively allocated funding to each park and fire management programs. Climate change is a major uncertainty in wildland fire management as it may lead to longer and more severe fire seasons. We varied the ROI surfaces and ran additional simulations to study how more severe fire conditions may influence the regional budget allocation decisions. Analysing these results helps managers to identify alternative budget allocation strategies while promoting sustainable development.

Assessing the value of fire planning alternatives is challenging because fire affects a wide array of ecosystem, market, and social values. Pragmatic approaches to assessing the value of fire management are yet to be developed. Previous approaches to assessing the value of forest management relied on connecting site valuation with management variables. While sound, such analysis is too narrow to account for today's broader ecosystem services. Ecosystem management brought the design of fire regime condition class but it is entirely biophysical. Its void of economic information cripples its utility to support decision-making. By focusing on marginal analysis and the value of improvement obtained by fire management, we define and present a means of assessing the deviation of a landscape from its desired fire management condition. Using a case study site in Colorado, we displayed the deviation across a landscape and summed the deviations to produce a summary metric. This summary metric was used to assess the value of alternative fire management strategies on improving the desired fire management condition. It enabled us to identify which sites are most valuable to restore, even if they are in the same fire regime condition class. The case study site exemplified how a wide range of disparate values can be incorporated such as watershed, wildlife, property and timber. Positive deviations in the landscape from desired condition present opportunities for improvement or restoration through fuels treatment and negative deviations present opportunities for improvement through fuel efforts such as suppression.