Pacific Southwest Research Station

Integrated Decision Support for Cost Effective Fuel Treatments

Full title: Integrated decision support for cost effective fuel treatments under multiple resource goals

Proposal

Lead Researchers: Woodam Chung and Solomon Dobrowski, College of Forestry and Conservation, the University of Montana; J. Greg Jones and William J. Elliot, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station

Abstract

Many communities in the Lake Tahoe basin are at high risk for damage from wildfire. The USDA Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU) and other land management agencies in the basin have collectively developed multi-jurisdictional fuel reduction and wildfire prevention strategies (LTBMU 2007) to address severe wildfire threats. Such strategies, however, have not yet been thoroughly evaluated in terms of fuels treatment effects on fire behavior, water quality, ecosystem processes, as well as their cost effectiveness. There are a number of models that can address some of these effects independently, but the collective effects of fuels treatments have been neither addressed, nor incorporated into a decision making system for fuels management in the Basin. There is a critical need to merge these systems into one decision support tool that streamlines analyses for identifying where, when, and how to treat to maintain desired fuel reduction and ecological goals, while meeting given resource and operational constraints. We propose a 2.5-year project to develop an integrated decision support system and apply it in the Lake Tahoe basin. Building upon two current research projects by the PI and Co-PIs, our support system will combine the vegetation simulation capabilities of FVS-FFE, the fire behavior capabilities of FlamMap, the water quality prediction capabilities of FS WEPP, and the spatial scheduling and cost effectiveness analysis capabilities of MAGIS into one system. This will provide land managers the ability to spatially schedule fuel treatments on a landscape and to also analyze tradeoffs of different management strategies. Users will have to learn one seamlessly integrated system to develop the most cost effective way of maintaining fuel treatments in the Basin, while simultaneously addressing treatment effects on fire behavior, water quality and ecosystem restoration. Our research thus addresses Sub-theme "Evaluating alternatives for fuel treatments" under Theme 1 of Lake Tahoe Research RFP 2008.

Expected date of final products: December 2011.
Progress Report available for download

Schedule of milestones and deliverables