Matthew P. Thompson

A comparative risk assessment framework for wildland fire management: the 2010 cohesive strategy science report

The FLAME Act of 2009 requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Interior to submit to Congress a Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy. In this report, we explore the general science available for a risk-based approach to fire and fuels management and suggest analyses that may be applied at multiple scales to inform decisionmaking and tradeoff analysis. We discuss scientific strengths and limitations of wildfire risk assessment frameworks, including the benefit of broad scalability as demonstrated by four recent case studies. We further highlight the role of comparative risk assessment, which extends the analysis to include the decision space available to managers and stakeholders to allow them to explore the tradeoffs between alternative courses of action. We identify scientific limitations of the analytical protocol and discuss questions of how to better address climate change, smoke modeling issues, and socioeconomic vulnerability, and how to better quantify treatment effectiveness. Key challenges are: achieving a balance between retaining analytical flexibility at regional and sub-regional planning scales while simultaneously retaining data and methodological consistency at the national scale, and identifying and aligning regional and national priorities to inform multi-objective strategy development. As implementation proceeds, the analytical protocol will no doubt be modified, but the contents of this report comprise a rigorous and transparent framework for comparative risk assessment built from the best available science.

An empirical machine learning method for predicting potential fire control locations for pre-fire planning and operational fire management

During active fire incidents, decisions regarding where and how to safely and effectively deploy resources to meet management objectives are often made under rapidly evolving conditions, with limited time to assess management strategies or for development of backup plans if initial efforts prove unsuccessful. Under all but the most extreme fire weather conditions, topography and fuels are significant factors affecting potential fire spread and burn severity. We leverage these relationships to quantify the effects of topography, fuel characteristics, road networks and fire suppression effort on the perimeter locations of 238 large fires, and develop a predictive model of potential fire control locations spanning a range of fuel types, topographic features and natural and anthropogenic barriers to fire spread, on a 34000km2 landscape in southern Idaho and northern Nevada. The boosted logistic regression model correctly classified final fire perimeter locations on an independent dataset with 69% accuracy without consideration of weather conditions on individual fires. The resulting fire control probability surface has potential for reducing unnecessary exposure for fire responders, coordinating pre-fire planning for operational fire response, and as a network of locations to incorporate into spatial fire planning to better align fire operations with land management objectives.

The influence of incident management teams on the deployment of wildfire suppression resources

Despite large commitments of personnel and equipment to wildfire suppression, relatively little is known about the factors that affect how many resources are ordered and assigned to wildfire incidents and the variation in resources across incident management teams (IMTs). Using detailed data on suppression resource assignments for IMTs managing the highest complexity wildfire incidents (Type 1 and Type 2), this paper examines daily suppression resource use and estimates the variation in resource use between IMTs. Results suggest that after controlling for fire and landscape characteristics, and for higher average resource use on fires in California, differences between IMTs account for ~14% of variation in resource use. Of the 89 IMTs that managed fires from 2007 to 2011, 17 teams exhibited daily resource capacity that was significantly higher than resource use for the median team.

A review of challenges to determining and demonstrating efficiency of large fire management

Characterising the impacts of wildland fire and fire suppression is critical information for fire management decision-making. Here, we focus on decisions related to the rare larger and longer-duration fire events, where the scope and scale of decision-making can be far broader than initial response efforts, and where determining and demonstrating efficiency of strategies and actions can be particularly troublesome. We organise our review around key decision factors such as context, complexity, alternatives, consequences and uncertainty, and for illustration contrast fire management in Andalusia, Spain, and Montana, USA. Two of the largest knowledge gaps relate to quantifying fire impacts to ecosystem services, and modelling relationships between fire management activities and avoided damages. The relative magnitude of these and other concerns varies with the complexity of the socioecological context in which fire management decisions are made. To conclude our review, we examine topics for future research, including expanded use of the economics toolkit to better characterise the productivity and effectiveness of suppression actions, integration of ecosystem modelling with economic principles, and stronger adoption of risk and decision analysis within fire management decision-making.

The Science and Opportunity of Wildfire Risk Assessment

Wildfire management within the United States continues to increase in complexity, as the converging drivers of (1) increased development into fire-prone areas, (2) accumulated fuels from historic management practices, and (3) climate change potentially magnify threats to social and ecological values (Bruins et al., 2010; Gude et al., 2008; Littell et al., 2009). The need for wildfire risk assessment tools continues to grow, as land management agencies attempt to map wildfire risk and develop strategies for mitigation. Developing and employing wildfire risk assessment models can aid management decision-making, and can facilitate prioritization of investments in mitigating losses and restoring fire on fire prone landscapes. Further, assessment models can be used for monitoring trends in wildfire risk over space and across time.

Studying interregional wildland fire engine assignments for large fire suppression

One crucial component of large fire response in the United States (US) is the sharing of wildland firefighting resources between regions: resources from regions experiencing low fire activity supplement resources in regions experiencing high fire activity. An important step towards improving the efficiency of resource sharing and related policies is to develop a better understanding of current assignment patterns. In this paper we examine the set of interregional wildland fire engine assignments for incidents in California and the Southwest Geographic Coordination Areas, utilising data from the Resource Ordering and Status System. We study a set of multinomial logistic models to examine seasonal and regional patterns affecting the probabilities of interregional resource assignments. This provides a quantitative and objective way to identify the factors strongly influencing interregional assignments. We found that the fire activity in the regions significantly affects response probabilities, as does the season and the national preparedness level. Because our models indicate significant unexplained variation, even when accounting for fire activity, seasonality and resource scarcity, we hypothesise that the existing system could benefit from future research.