Help manage wildfire risk by guiding fire movement and containment strategies. Management Actions, including prescribed fire and mechanical treatments, reduce fire risk and protect carbon storage. Prioritizing treatments is complex, requiring tools like ForSys and Planscape to balance resources, risks, and objectives effectively.
Planning Units are used to compartmentalize questions of management. For fire risk, two common planning units are Firesheds and Potential Operational Delineations (PODs). Firesheds are landscape units created to understand and manage the movement of fire across landscapes. Firesheds are the planning units used in the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. More information about firesheds is available here. PODs are landscape units created to plan for fire occurrences before an ignition occurs. Understanding the current condition of PODs can help land managers target treatments to improve containment opportunities, and address significant risks to firefighters. More information is available here.
Include any set of activities that is carried out to impact vegetation structure or composition. Activities are chosen based on the location-specific priorities, objectives of the land manager or agency, as well as budgetary and regulatory constraints. The primary management actions to reduce risk to carbon on fire-adapted forests are cultural burning, prescribed fire, and a variety of mechanical fuel rearrangements and removals. The Forest Service has been working on a compendium of active management treatments, with costs associated based on the FACTs database. Many of the treatments have been written in code that can be run in the Forest Vegetation Simulator.
Is a complex task. Planners must work with limited budgets, workforce and physical constraints, and consider multiple, often conflicting priorities. Scenario planning tools can help managers choose treatment locations based on multiple objectives. ForSys, and the open source Planscape, which utilizes ForSys algorithms, is a treatment prioritization program that can be used to explore spatial placement of management actions across a range of priorities and constraints.
