Developing the US Wildland Fire Decision Support System

Abstract

A new decision support tool, the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) has been developed to support risk-informed decision-making for individual fires in the United States. WFDSS accesses national weather data and forecasts, fire behavior prediction, economic assessment, smoke management assessment, and landscape databases to efficiently formulate and apply information to the decision making process. Risk-informed decision-making is becoming increasingly important as a means of improving fire management and offers substantial opportunities to benefit natural and community resource protection, management response effectiveness, firefighter resource use and exposure, and, possibly, suppression costs. This paper reviews the development, structure, and function of WFDSS, and how it contributes to increased flexibility and agility in decision making, leading to improved fire management program effectiveness.

AEGIS: a wildfire prevention and management information system

“…A prototype spatial fire hazard estimation system was developed and incorporated into AEGIS that uses both ignition probability and expected burn area, thus providing an integrated fire hazard metric (e.g., Miller and Ager, 2013;Scott et al, 2013). Initially, ANN were used for the mathematical modeling of conditional probability of ignition (CPI), based on independent variables (i.e., latitude, longitude, altitude, month, day of week, distance from urban areas, distance from power lines, distance from main and secondary roads, distance from landfills, distance from agricultural areas), in conjunction with spatial weather forecasts from SKIRON that depict wind speed, rain, relative humidity and temperature.…”

“…Decision support systems are increasingly being developed and applied in a number of different capacities to improve firefighter protection, develop tactical firefighting strategies, analyze landscape fuels reduction programs, and provide for environmental protection Kalabokidis, 2004;Miller and Ager, 2013;Noonan-Wright et al, 2011). Acquired knowledge from these information systems gives fire protection agencies the ability to spatially define and identify high-risk areas, in the short-and long-term, and plan the necessary preventive and control actions as part of a wildfire risk governance system (Miller and Ager, 2013;Taylor et al, 1997).…”

“…Tailor-made wildfire decision support systems have been developed and used in a number of different wildfire regions, including Spain (Alonso-Betanzos et al, 2003), France (Figueras Jové et al, 2014), Italy (Losso et al, 2012), Turkey (Gumusay and Sahin, 2009), the US (Noonan-Wright et al, 2011), and in the alpine areas of Europe (Corgnati et al, 2008). Despite the large number of systems, few of them can be considered fully integrated solutions to the wildfire management problem, and generally each of the aforementioned systems has emphasized a specific functionality.…”

“…A strategic and tactical suppression system was built in the US (Wildland Fire Decision Support System, WFDSS) (Noonan-Wright et al, 2011) that is widely used for incident support. WFDSS assists fire managers and analysts in making strategic and tactical decisions for fire incidents with a system that is easy to use, intuitive, linear, scalable and progressively responsive to changing fire complexity.…”

FLIRE DSS: A web tool for the management of floods and wildfires in urban and periurban areas

“…Thus, the information provided to the person responsible for the confrontation of natural disasters will be available in a manner of real-time response. DSS are popular in several fields like water resources management [6], renewable resources management [7], environmental management [8], fire management [9,10]) and flood management [11]. Moreover, the application of a DSS is considered vital in the areas of fire and flood management where the early detection of the ignition of the fire or the early warning of a flood event is crucial for the protection of human lives, properties and assets.…”