Here’s an item that caught my eye in Mike Archer’s Wildfire News of the Day email today:
Wildfire NOTD subscriber Katie Lighthall, Coordinator for the Western Regional Strategy Committee (http://wildfireinthewest.blogspot.com), sent along their latest newsletter.
Demonstrations of Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy in the West – Newsletter #66 https://mailchi.mp/5abe3d9605b5/news-cohesive-strategy-west-2418125?e=05ef71fab4
From the Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy newsletter:
Oregon is the latest state to enter into a Shared Stewardship agreement with the US Forest Service to collectively set priorities and increase the scope and scale of critical forest treatments that support communities and improve forest conditions. In addition to the Oregon agreement signed this week, in recent months Idaho, Montana, Washington and Utah have signed on to these historical agreements that allow for mutual prioritization and implementation of landscape-scale projects for forest and watershed health, timber values and catastrophic wildfire prevention without the conflict of boundary lines. The agreements also allow for the use of new tools and technology such as the Scenario Investment Planning tool that helps land managers assess where investments will have the best outcomes based on specific priorities and achievement rates.
The Scenario Investment Planning Project (SIPP) web site says:
The scenario planning project is a US Forest Service initiative to improve investment strategies in landscape treatments. The tool will help explore tradeoffs and assess progress towards nationally identified priorities and targets. The tool fills a gap in current planning by providing a way to understand how priorities such as reducing wildfire impacts to communities at the national scale lead to outcomes on the ground. This project is integrating existing Forest Service models and data into a simulation framework to explore system-wide management scenarios and associated tradeoffs. The system will provide a method to analyze tradeoffs among land treatment investment strategies aimed at improving forest conditions and reducing wildfire risk. In contrast to typical assessments of forest conditions, this framework provides a way to optimize treatments at the stand scale to meet larger scale objectives and constraints (Watersheds, Forests, Regions), providing a linkage between national policy and on-the-ground implementation. This interdisciplinary project brings together scientists from landscape planning, fire ecology, operations research, and economics, to build linkages between science and operations that heretofore have not existed.
The SIPP website has lots of background info and a story map.
“In contrast to typical assessments of forest conditions, this framework provides a way to optimize treatments at the stand scale to meet larger scale objectives and constraints (Watersheds, Forests, Regions), providing a linkage between national policy and on-the-ground implementation.” I support efforts to mesh desired outcomes at different scales, which makes it more likely they will be achieved. It’s important to recognize that the scale that has legal implications from NFMA and its required public participation is the forest scale, so forest plan decisions are not just another piece of “data,” as this process seems to treat it. But it at least recognizes forest plans as an input to the process.