Fuel treatment planning can be difficult on large landscapes with multiple objectives. The LTD (Landscape Treatment Designer) program automates the process and allows for combining several objectives in weighted combinations so that treatment alternatives can be quickly generated and mapped. RTOM can be used to create aggregated (contiguous patches) or non-aggregated (fragmented pattern) fuel treatment pattern(s).

The LTD program is a multicriteria optimization routine to help design fuel treatment scenarios according to spatial and non-spatial objectives. The input data represent polygons that are attributed with information about expected fire behavior and the polygons overall contribution to one or more landscape management objectives. These can include non-spatial attributes such as stand conditions, and/or spatial attributes like the distance to fire susceptible landscape features like critical habitat or residential structures. The user supplies a treatment constraint that represents the maximum area that can be treated based on budgets or other constraints. In a simple application, the program operates the same as sorting a shapefile attribute table based on fields of interest and then selecting polygons from the sorted list until some total area limit is met. However, LTD automates the process and allows for combining several attributes in weighted combinations so that treatment alternatives can be quickly generated and mapped. A non-adjacency problem would allocate treatments based on objective values regardless of their location relative to each other. LTD also has adjacency constraints that allow it to coordinate treatments and build patches that can serve as wildland fire use areas or large scale prescribed fire treatment areas.

LTD User Webpage

Please visit the LTD user page for more information, program download, and a program tutorial.

Citation

Ager, A.A.; Vaillant, N.M.; Owens, D.E.; Brittain, S.; Hamann, J. 2012. Overview and example application of the Landscape Treatment Designer. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-859. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 11 p. (PDF, 3.9MB)