Our readings this week expand on efforts to explore the spatial elements of wildfire risk or management. Be prepared to talk about the methods and strategies used to arrive at the outcomes implicated in each reading.
 |
| USDA |
Please have comments uploaded by Monday at noon. That will give our discussion leads time to prepare.
Thanks, and see you all on Wednesday.
In calculating priorities for Fireshed prescriptive measures, a primary metric used by Ager et al (2021) is “number of buildings” exposed. Buildings are defined to include “housing units, apartments, and farm, storage, and industrial buildings, etc” (3). Does the conflation of all these different types of building provide an accurate metric for identifying communities and high-value resources most at risk?
ReplyDeleteAger et al maintain that the Shared Stewardship Performance Framework will provide metrics for assessing success of the implementation of prescriptions based on the Fireshed model (20-21). But at this point, that model only considers developed areas (ie, buildings) in determining priority treatments, not water quality or habitat or other ecosystem services. If high-priority landscapes within the Fireshed model are based on exposures to building infrastructure, how/when are these other resources and values being considered? Do the POD Atlases described by Thompson et al offer a more comprehensive way of thinking about communities risks, values and response capabilities?
Palaiologos et al set out to describe patterns of where cross-boundary fire risk is greatest, on a fine-scale but across a very large study area. While their findings offer an enormous of amount of data on cross-boundary fire, do they provide useful patterns for addressing and assessing risk? Given complexity of parcel size, parcel edge and the predominance of ignitions on the “private lands” and “WUI” tenures, which consist of many different ownerships within them, how is this study being operationalized?
Ager et al
ReplyDeleteWhen discussing risk in the discussion section of the report, they acknowledge the different assessments of risk but then go on to say that the fireshed registry is different because it identifies the source of the risk. They are approaching the problem from a different angle, but their definition of risk still seems consistent with the structure's location relative to the surrounding conditions. While the intention seems to be to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people- is it missing a key assessment of populations that have increased risk due to a lack of resources or social vulnerability?
Thompson et al
These PODs remind me of building preplans that structure fire departments use to identify layouts, hazards, and other data relative to operations and planning for their response area. I see this concept as valuable on several levels- from planning to the response. They identify several limitations to widespread implementation and maintenance- mainly revolving around limitations of time and resources. Could the program team focus on creating an application or online tools that local units could use to create their own PODs? Would that address the need for local input to make a usable product? At least at first look, this seems like a decision support tool (for planning mitigations, or responses) that can consider more forms of risk rather than just structures relative to the environment.
Palaiologou et al
They indicate that structure exposure problems originated mostly on WUI or private lands and less on federal lands. That finding would point to a need to emphasize local mitigations to reduce structure exposures and yet programs like the fireshed registry focus on exposure from public lands. Obviously, the Forest Service needs to make efforts to keep fires that originate or pass through forest service land from impacting structures among other objectives. Is it possible though that the Forest Service strategy would be more impactful if it focused more on private and WUI mitigation as structure exposure mitigation? Given issues with jurisdiction the Forest Service would likely not be able to engage in much direct management, but supporting (more) state and local communities in mitigation efforts may in the broadest public service sense be the biggest bang for the buck.
Palaiologos et al. 2019- Cross-Boundary Wildfire events in Western US
ReplyDeleteDid you buy the purpose of Palaiologos et al.? Do you think understanding where fire is likely to span ownership boundaries can help prioritize where local/on the ground entities should be collaborating on wildfire management topics? Do you think it would be appropriate to use their mapping outputs to help strategically fund collaborative wildfire efforts?
Thompson et al. 2020
Considering our conversation last week, I noticed that vulnerable populations were not incorporated into the POD data (although net value was). Would some level of vulnerability data be appropriate in this context? Would this add to the utility of the tool? Is there a diminishing return in terms of data included in a POD atlas (i.e., too much information reduces the ease of use)?
The positive results of the net expected value change (eNVC metric) were interesting. Of PODs they created and analyzed, only a fraction had net positive eNVC values. The metrics they used to calculate eNVC I thought made sense, but I wondered if the benefits of fire were underrepresented somehow. Do their results help articulate the benefits of fire, or do the opposite?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAger et al. suggest several factors that could be used to evaluate the success of the Shared Stewardship initiative and of the fireshed registry. These factors are changes in fire severity, risk, predicted fire transmission and the overall health of ecosystem services (Ager et al. 20, 21). Are there any other metrics that could be used to measure the fireshed registry's performance?
ReplyDeleteMany papers we've read this semester note the importance of trust and local context when implementing mitigation treatments. Palaiologos et al. emphasize prioritizing fuel treatments that consider human context (1766), but don't really discuss integrating that context within the scope of this paper. Is this type of analytical, mostly biophysical approach to fuel reduction compatible with management tactics like Community Wildfire Preparedness Plans and their intentional vagueness?
Thompson et al. recognize that lack of GIS skills could be an issue for management units who want to create personalized POD atlases (13). Skill gaps between units could mean some districts have access to frequently-updated, easily interpreted booklets and others have outdated documents they don't really use, causing communication issues for visiting resources during fire operations. What are some ways to work around this problem?
Modelers often backcast their models in order to evaluate the model’s ability to ‘predict’ historic events/outcomes, which gives an indication of model’s predictive capability. I’m wondering why Ager et al. didn’t attempt this with the Fireshed Registry? Is it because social and biophysical systems vary so much over time? Or incomplete data?
ReplyDeleteFor Palaiologou et al.: Given the complexities of fire exchange where parcels are smaller and more numerous, I wonder if makes sense to simplify exchange by creating a community-wide defensible space? This would allow the community to perform mitigations along a continuous and shared boundary rather than asking its members to perform isolated fuels reductions which may not actually connect (and therefore protect the community as a whole).
(On all three papers) Let’s look into the crystal ball: Alex and his team have been replaced by a swarm of MQ-1 Predator drones retrofitted to fight fire. The drones patrol high risk areas for the duration of the fire season while receiving updated geospatial fire simulations from a central command center, which the drones then couple with real-time data about recreationist density, location, and associated ignition probabilities. Fires are easily suppressed near WUI areas while large wildfires for ecosystem benefits are monitored by drone. Is this living well with fire?
Palaiologou et al. mentioned the potential treatment towards 7 million ha through traditional timber harvest methods and 14 million ha through prescribed fire and/or another fuel treatment. Would this scenario be ideal? Would it be better to have an equal and double the amount of sample size of timber harvest methods and prescribed fire and/or another fuel treatment?
ReplyDeleteThompson et al. mentioned highlighting three PODs specifically (PODs 31, 38, and 77) and the POD size is dictated by the operational concerns of suitable control locations, size is an operational factor. What would the best approach be if the best/recommended POD is unable to cover the sample size required for specific studies?
Ager mentioned obtaining data from FACTS (USDA FS 2020) however they discovered half of the data of national forests were incomplete. If there was a significant amount of data incomplete, would the data previously collected be considered accurate/inaccurate for the study?
Palaiologos
ReplyDeleteIf I understand correctly, Palaiologos et al. define fireshed as the area in which ignitions have potential to threaten structures. This strikes me as an older, more suppression-minded perspective of wildfire. For fire management purposes, would it be more useful to define firesheds more similarly to how we define watersheds? Identifying landscape-scale areas that have potential to burn in a single event under favorable burning conditions allows us to identify structures at risk, identify potential holding locations for suppression actions, and better evaluate the potential resource benefit effects of a fire.
Thompson
While PODs appear to have the ability to act as a strong planning tool for land managers, most of the limitations of PODs described by Thompson et al. can be traced back to two concepts we have discussed previously in this class: (1) cross-jurisdictional cooperation and multi-level governance, and (2) federal agencies maintaining the minimum staffing levels required to accomplish their goals. Are these two problems being solved effectively enough to utilize a concept like PODs as a planning tool?
Fireshed Registry
The fireshed registry utilized density of structures as a variable to identify priority firesheds. As Wibbenmeyer and others have found, higher density communities tend to be made up of higher-value homes and higher-income individuals. This may mean that higher income groups are being subsidized to live in dangerous places at the expense of socially vulnerable groups. What metrics other than structure density can be used to identify priority firesheds to lead to a more equitable outcome?