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By Josh McDaniel
Fact Sheet-Fire Behavior Modeling and Decision Support Systems
Sitting around tables in the darkened room, a group of federal land managers, environmentalists, local residents, contractors, and timber industry representatives stare intently at paper maps and projected GIS maps lining the side walls and the front of the room. These unlikely collaborators are participating in a Stewardship and Fireshed Assessment for the Mendocino National Forest in California. Fireshed assessments have gained traction in California as a tool for fuels management planning in the State’s national forests. So far, workshops have been held in 7 of the 11 national forests in California with more planned in the remaining. Using state-of-the-art fire behavior modeling and strategic placement of fuel treatments, fireshed assessments are being hailed as an innovative approach to the tremendous fuels problem that is dominating public lands management across the country. The assessments have been found to be especially useful in areas where forest management is contested and fuel treatments of any variety are controversial.
The group that has developed the process and led each of the workshops in California, is headed by Berni Bahro, a regional fuels planning specialist and Klaus Barber, a regional analyst for the Pacific Southwest Region of the Forest Service. They stress the collaborative methods that make up the process as its key strength, and this is especially important in the State with some of the national forest systems’ most pressing challenges from growth and development and strained relations among stakeholder groups.
“Most people have a perception of the fireshed assessments as only a set of modeling tools, but really the models are just used to promote dialogue,’ says Klaus Barber. “The real strength of this process is the collaboration and the active learning that goes on." He adds, "We use a rapid assessment process that requires collaborators to develop working assumptions where data or cause and effect relationships are not known or where a consensus on effects does not exist. It's important to focus on getting and exploring everyone's ideas and not trying to find 'one right answer' if collaboration is going to succeed.”
The goal of the assessments is to design the most effective fuel treatment program as possible with the resources available – to get the most bang for the buck in reducing the likelihood of a large, severe wildfire. “Fireshed assessments are like triage,” asserts Berni Bahro. “We don’t have the resources to do fuel treatments completely so the assessments are designed to identify the areas we defer and which areas we do now. That is where the public involvement and collaboration comes in. Our partners help us with the difficult choices of which areas do not get treated. Everyone that participates in the workshop then buys into the final set to recommendations that is produced. By having this open discussion up front, the goal is to simplify the rest of the planning process so more projects can get implemented quicker and at a lower cost and with less controversy.”
SPLATS and Optimized Treatments
While fireshed assessments may involve a great deal of collaboration, they are built on a high powered fusion of state-of-the-art GIS and landscape fire behavior modeling. In fact, fireshed assessments are the quintessential example of applying cutting edge research findings to real field problems. At the Mendocino workshop, the projectors are humming; and in the back, a row of computer analysts tap on their laptops. The map of most interest at the moment is one of the projected GIS maps on the wall showing a pattern of bright blue shapes positioned across a multi-colored map of the forest showing topography, vegetation types, roads, and housing developments. These blue shapes are called SPLATS - Strategically Placed landscape Area Treatments or SPOTS, Strategic Placement of Treatments- in the lingo of the fireshed assessment. (The term SPOTS is used interchangeably with SPLATS, and there is an effort afoot by the national leadership to establish SPOTS as the preferred term. In recognition of that effort, this article will use the term SPOTS from here on). The shapes represent fuel treatment areas that the group has decided to test using the fire behavior modeling software running on the laptops in the back.
SPOTS and the concept of strategically placed fuels treatments are built on the research and fire behavior modeling of Mark Finney of the Missoula Fire Lab in the Rocky Mountain Research Station. Finney’s research on optimized treatments reveals that how you spatially arrange fuel treatments across the landscape is much more important than how much of the area is treated. Using the fire behavior modeling software FARSITE and FlamMap, Finney and his colleagues at the Missoula Fire Lab have shown that treatments on only 20 to 30 percent of the landscape can be effective in reducing the threat of crown fires and other severe fire behavior if the spatial arrangement of the treatments interrupts the fire’s rate of spread. Mark Finney – “Fires are typically large compared to the size of the average treatment, so they just go around them. You aren’t getting any collective benefit of these individual treatment areas, even if they perform great individually. If they are alone; it is like one sandbag in the middle of the Mississippi River. We had to ask – what are we trying to do with fuel treatments? If we aren’t modifying the largest fires and their extents; then what are we actually accomplishing?”
Berni Bahro adds that in the past, land managers have had a hard time taking a landscape perspective in laying out fuel treatments. “Most fuel treatments were designed to capture cheap acreage – big units in which they could burn a lot of acreage cheaply and easily. In other cases, they chose areas because they posed the highest hazard in terms of fuel conditions or location,” Bahro says. “But those projects cost more money to do and were more complex. This type of project planning usually didn't consider how fires move across landscapes.”
At the Mendocino workshop another map is flashed onto a whiteboard screen. This map shows the same set of blue SPOTS, but superimposed over that is a series of white lines spreading out like a tightly woven spider web from the center of one of the drainages. The design shows the spread of a modeled wildfire moving out from an ignition point through the landscape based on vegetation conditions, topography, and weather. Tightly spaced lines show a slow rate of spread and widely spaced lines a rapid one. The participants examine how the fire reacts when it comes into contact with the SPOTS. In some cases it comes to a complete stop and in others it slowly wraps around, or flanks the treatment and continues its progression at a reduced clip. In other areas, gaps emerge where the fire is able to avoid the SPOTS and increase rate of spread through dense fuels and accommodating terrain. The group makes notes, and then starts adjusting the pattern to cover the gaps. They draw up another pattern of treatments and send it back to the computer for another run through the models.
Modifying landscape-scale fire behavior when only a portion of the landscape can be realistically treated requires attention to layout. Mark Finney’s research indicates that fire spread rates can be reduced, even outside of treated area, if a fire is forced to flank treated areas where fuels have been reduced. However, two criteria must be met for the strategy to be effective: 1) the pattern of treatments must be laid out in a manner that interrupts fire spread, and 2) prescriptions within the treatments must be designed to modify fire behavior. Barber says, “The idea is to lay out areas that function as ‘speed bumps’ slowing the spread and reducing the intensity of fires.”
Of course, forest management has to be conducted with multiple objectives in mind. The impact of fuel treatments on wildlife habitat, threatened and endangered species, and recreational opportunities are essential considerations. In addition, forest managers often have an opportunity to generate revenue through timber sales to cover or offset the costs of management activities. This means that optimal pattern for preventing wildfires is not a realistic option. The treatments are adjusted to protect sensitive wildlife habitat, reduce negative watershed effects, shape recreational opportunities, and to capture timber volume to help pay for treating more areas. Bobby Shindelar, Assistant Fire Management Officer for the Stanislaus National Forest in California, adds, "While conducting the analysis for SPOT size and location, you have to be aware of all of the trade-offs. Not all acres produce volume and other acres have higher treatment costs depending on the fuel type and prescription. You have to pay attention to difference in costs in treating acres in the wildland-urban interface and the costs in working in non-interface areas. Is the goal to reduce fire behavior or increase volume or both? These things are hashed out between all the participants involved - what compromises can everyone live with to achieve increased fire protection by minimizing wildfire damage."
What is a Fireshed?
The first step in the fireshed assessment process is to identify the firesheds that will be prioritized for treatment. That raises the most common question regarding the process – what exactly is a fireshed? Firesheds are not delineated in the same way that say a watershed is precisely outlined. This is a rough, coarse-scale process in which workshop participants identify the firesheds in the forest based on similar problems or characteristics: fuels, condition class, wildland-urban interface features, fire history, etc. “We do it with the broadest of felt pens,” says Klaus Barber. “If it takes a person who knows the area more than five minutes; then they are doing something wrong.”
Firesheds are drawn around the concept of the “problem fire.” This is the fire that participants at the workshop are scared of – the big one that could get away and cause a lot of damage. The problem fire can be based on a historical fire in the area, or one that land managers fear is around the corner based on fuel conditions and worst-case weather conditions in the forest.
After the firesheds have been identified and the problem fire outlined, the next step is to demonstrate to the participants how the model works and how closely it can reconstruct fire behavior. Using weather conditions from a large historic fire in the area, the team shows that they are capable of producing a pretty good approximation of the fire and modeling what actually happened. Bahro says that after the team shows that they can reconstruct the behavior of a historical fire in the area, it increases confidence among the workshop participants in the outputs generated by the fire models when they start testing their treatment patterns. They then model the same fire in a place that has not been treated – normally in one of the target firesheds identified by the group.
The last steps in the process form an iterative process in which the treatment locations, patterns, shapes, and sizes are refined through modeling of their effect on fire behavior and performance in protecting targeted resources such as structures, interface areas, or critical habitat. The group runs various scenarios until some consensus develops on the optimal fuel treatment mix.
Another strength of the process is that it generates a strategic, spatial program of work that goes far beyond a list of potential projects. The process generates a spatially defined schedule of where and when to do vegetation and fuels treatments in the future so that all desired treatments can get done in a reasonable time. A ‘scheduler’ program simulates the allocation of money and resources and shows the costs of doing the treatments outlined by the participants. It shows all of the trade-offs and how long it will take to accomplish what the participants want. Berni Bahro says, “We might show that with the choices made and resources available it will take fourteen years to protect the local communities. The community representatives are in the room and they might say, ‘That isn’t acceptable. We’ll give you five.’ That changes the way the choices are made.”
Ground Truthing: Local Perspectives on Fireshed Assessments
Fireshed assessments are in a broad sense a strategic planning effort. As with most plans, they tend to change when confronted with the reality on the ground. So far, fireshed assessments have been done in seven national forests in California and in eight other pilot projects across the country. When you talk to the land managers and stakeholders involved in those workshops and the implementation of the recommendations coming out of them, they stress the benefits and potential of the process, but are also quick to bring up the limitations.
Janet Flanagan is a Planning Officer with the Mendocino National Forest. She was a primary participant in the forest’s workshops and is now involved in implementing the forest’s fuels plan. She says that before the workshops, land managers in the forest's Grindstone District estimated that they needed to treat 38,000 acres annually on a 35 year rotation to tackle their fuels problem. That was impossible with the resources available. The recommendations coming out of the workshop entailed treatment of about 7000 acres per year, a much more reasonable target. “The SPOTS reduce the amount of acres we need to treat to keep wildland fires to a limited size.” She also mentions that the forest has heavy use from off-road vehicles. When fuelbreaks are utilized to control wildfires, these areas encourage OHV's to travel throughout them, causing resource damage. With the SPOTS the forest has been able to reduce the amount of fuelbreaks they have to put in and maintain, reducing costs and also reducing access by off-road vehicles to sensitive areas of the forest.
However, Flanagan does mention the downside of working with SPOTS – increased costs and reduced timber volumes. “We just finished an 8000 acre series of SPOTS with a commercial thin from below and burning. We had to do inventories and botany surveys on the whole 8000 acres, and yet the volume that came out of that was only about 2 million board feet. Under a timber oriented forest plan, a forester could go out there and find a similar stand and get about 3 million board feet.” Flanagan goes on to say that since the forest is a long way from a biomass plant, they have to remove enough volume to ensure that a contractor would make the trip and offset the costs of the treatments.
Representatives of environmental organizations have long argued against fuel treatment projects that they viewed as a pretext for timber harvesting. In this sense, many remain skeptical of the effectiveness of fireshed assessments. Monica Bond, a spotted owl biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity has participated in a number of the workshops in southern California. While she supports the idea of a strong spatial analysis of the most effective locations for fuel treatments, she is concerned about the actual prescriptions. “Are you logging trees of any size? Are you reducing the canopy too much? My concern is that in many on-the-ground projects, they are actually compromising owl habitat in their effort to protect it.” Bond also is concerned that the treatments that are developed in the assessments are not the actual treatments that are put in on the ground. “While the treatments in the assessments were designed to protect owl habitat, I think the treatments they are actually putting in on the ground are bigger and do not always correspond to the SPOTS.”
Land managers from the national forests contend that the SPOTS and prescriptions coming out of the assessments are not set in stone. Whenever the forest takes the recommendations to implementation and they start doing the NEPA analysis for the area, the size and shape of the SPOTS necessarily change. “This is the whole adaptive management part of the process,” says Bob Shindelar, from the Stanislaus National Forest. “When we started doing the NEPA for our treatments we found more owls than we had accounted for in the workshop, so we had to make some adjustments to the SPOTS for that reason. The SPOTS are drawn from a pure fire behavior perspective, once the resource specialists get out there and find out what is on the ground, we have to make changes.” Discovering these local nuances is important in revising assumptions used in the fireshed assessments and may lead to adjustments and changes in overall strategy and future projects, exactly what adaptive management is supposed to do.
Another limitation of the assessment is the tremendous amount of data needed by the models, not to mention the modeling and analytical skills needed to run the software. Beth Corbin, a fire ecologist with the Wasatch-Cache National Forest in Utah was a member of one of the teams that headed up a fireshed assessment pilot project. “In California they have these powerful teams that go around to all of the forests and they do a lot of the heavy work. Those of us in the other regions don’t have that, and, as you can imagine, it is a lot of work.”
The pilot projects have been an effort to expand the fireshed approach into something more than a “California thing.” Eight sites were chosen in different regions of the country with different fuel conditions, ownership patterns, social and economic situations, and potential fire behaviors. While the pilot teams received some training from the main cadre in California, they did not have all of the modeling and analytical experience, skills, and technology that have supported the California assessments. Corbin adds, “We were chosen as a pilot project because we are in a LANDFIRE prototype area. They figured that this might be a good test for using the LANDFIRE data in FARSITE runs. We found that it took a lot of work to get this data into a reasonable form to be used for this. We didn’t have the skills to do that, so we had to bring in outside help and rely on technological support from the Missoula Fire Lab.” Corbin concluded that there is benefit to the process, especially if you need a well-documented process backing up decision-making (as in California where all fuel treatment decisions are contested), but in rural Utah the amount of work did not justify the end results. “I think the process simply verified what we intuitively thought.”
Technology and Will Power
Sue Stewart, an applied fire ecologist, is leading a national, interagency program to promote fireshed assessments across the country. She directed the establishment of the pilot projects across the country, and is very optimistic about the potential of this approach to become an integral part of fuel treatment planning.
“We learned a great deal from the pilot projects. We learned that using the modeling tools requires a great deal of skill, training, and technological support. The models are also data-hungry, and calibration requires a tremendous amount of work. I think we also may need to reduce the amount of models that we are using and work to improve and simplify the ones that have proven to be the most useful and effective.” Despite the problems the pilot teams faced in conducting the assessments, Stewart is confident that SPOTS and fireshed assessments will continue to expand in their utility. “I now see SPOTS and fireshed assessments as having the potential to become standard operating procedure at a variety of scales. They could be used to collaborate with communities in developing CWPPs (Community Wildfire Protection Plans). There is also strong potential to use SPOTS in developing forest management plans, and in environmental strategic planning for NEPA teams.”
Wayne Cook, a technology transfer specialist with the Missoula Fire Lab, also sees growth in the use of fireshed assessments. He is already looking to the next generation of modeling technology that will be much more integrated within a GIS framework. “We are working on integrating FARSITE and FlamMap within an ArcGIS interface termed ArcFuels (being developed by Alan Agar, a researcher with the Pacific Northwest Research Station). Within this framework the various inputs and outputs of the different applications will move back and forth much more freely. The huge amounts of time spent in translating data from one application type to another will be reduced if not eliminated. I think within a year, this technology will be much more accessible to a wider range of forests and people.”
As anyone who has worked in natural resource management knows, shifts in ways of doing things come about from cultural and perspective shifts as much as technological ones. Mark Finney thinks that the obstacles to growth in the use of strategic fuels treatment strategies are not related to developments with the technology. The technological and analytical capacity exists within the agencies; he believes it is more about will.
“When timber management was the focus, they went out there and laid out units and they applied tremendous technology to regulate the flow of products from the land over long periods of time. So, this is nothing new, that level of planning and spatial analysis is not new to the Forest Service. They modeled forest growth and yield through very sophisticated biometric growth techniques and harvest scheduling out 100 yrs or more. They planned and planned. It can be done with fire and fuels as well. It is really just a matter of will power.”
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