Prototyping a Geospatial Atlas for Wildfire Planning and Management

Abstract

Wildland fire managers are increasingly embracing risk management principles by being more anticipatory, proactive, and “engaging the fire before it starts”. This entails investing in pre-season, cross-boundary, strategic fire response planning with partners and stakeholders to build a shared understanding of wildfire risks and management opportunities. A key innovation in planning is the development of potential operational delineations (PODs), i.e., spatial management units whose boundaries are relevant to fire containment operations (e.g., roads, ridgetops, and fuel transitions), and within which potential fire consequences, suppression opportunities/challenges, and strategic response objectives can be analyzed to inform fire management decision making. As of the summer of 2020, PODs have been developed on more than forty landscapes encompassing National Forest System lands across the western USA, providing utility for planning, communication, mitigation prioritization, and incident response strategy development. Here, we review development of a decision support tool—a POD Atlas—intended to facilitate cross-boundary, collaborative strategic wildfire planning and management by providing high-resolution information on landscape conditions, values at risk, and fire management resource needs for individual PODs. With the atlas, users can rapidly access and assimilate multiple forms of pre-loaded data and analytics in a customizable manner. We prototyped and operationalized this tool in concert with, and for use by, fire managers on several National Forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains of the USA. We present examples, discuss real-world use cases, and highlight opportunities for continued decision support improvement.

Assessing Potential Safety Zone Suitability Using a New Online Mapping Tool

“…Travel rates used in geospatial modeling can simulate the evacuation of a fire crew in comparison to predicted fire behavior in order to assess potential trigger points on the landscape that a fire crew could use [51]. Beyond SZs and escape routes, there is an emergence of other geospatially driven approaches for fire management that have implications for firefighter safety, such as the mapping of snag hazards [52], the spatially explicit estimation of suppression difficulty [2,53], the prediction of potential control locations [3,54], and the mapping of potential wildland fire operational delineations [55,56]. These tools are now commonly used in the US to enhance situational awareness and improve the quality of strategic decision-making on large and complex wildfire incidents [57].…”

Human ignitions on private lands drive USFS cross-boundary wildfire transmission and community impacts in the western US

“…When combined with local experiential knowledge, spatially explicit decision support tools like quantitative risk assessments 63 , suppression difficulty maps 64 , and potential control location atlases provide stakeholders with a common operating picture that can be used as the basis for co-managing risk 30 , 65 . Mapping the components of fire risk allows all landowners to simultaneously assess their exposure to wildfire and their contribution to the exposure of adjoining jurisdictions 66 , 67 . Transparency in pre-fire planning and risk governance can help build consensus around which actors are responsible for managing specific components of CB fire risk.…”

A Potential Framework for Allocating National Park Service Budgets

“…Many of those would likely allow us to improve future program, regional and national fire program budgeting analysis. For example, a recent study from Thompson et al (2021) suggested preseason and strategic fire planning following potential operational delineations (PODs), which are spatial management units with boundaries relevant to fire containment operations features such as roads, ridgetops, and fuel transitions. Fire risk attributes such as fire consequences, suppression opportunities, and strategic response objectives can be analyzed for each POD to optimize fire management decision making within them.…”