Pacific Southwest Research Station

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

Principal Investigators:
Woodam Chung, University of Montana
Greg Jones, USDA Forest Service-Rocky Mountain Research Station
Solomon Dobrowski, University of Montana
William Elliot, USDA Forest Service-Rocky Mountain Research Station

Proposal [pdf]

Final Report [pdf]

OptFuels website

Please contact Dr. Woodam Chung with questions regarding the final report.

Project Summary

The objectives of this project were to: 1) develop an integrated decisions support system for optimizing fuel treatment locations in time and space to achieve multiple management objectives while meeting resource and operational constraints, 2) develop applications of the system for the Lake Tahoe Basin, and 3) deliver the system to end users.

A GIS-based decision support system, called OptFuels, has been developed for spatially scheduling forest fuel treatments over multiple planning periods in the Lake Tahoe Basin. OptFuels combines the vegetation simulation capabilities of the Forest Vegetation Simulator, the landscape fire behavior modeling functionality of the Minimum Travel Time algorithm in FlamMap, and a heuristic algorithm for scheduling fuel treatments.  

This integrated system provides land managers with a streamlined ability to develop spatiotemporal fuel treatment alternatives and assess trade-offs among various alternatives and no action.