Identifying and Assessing Needs, Values, Capacities and Future Landscape Visions to Inform Collaborative Wildfire Risk Reduction Strategies

Fuel reduction treatments including mechanical thinning and prescribed fire can be very effective in meeting Wildfire Crisis Strategy goals. There are, however, barriers to their use. Public acceptance of prescribed fire may be influenced by a range of factors. These include assessed wildfire risk, previous experience with fuels management, and beliefs and values.

Increased familiarity and knowledge of fuel treatments can improve their social acceptance. The most important factors influencing social acceptance often vary by geographical context, and an area’s ecological, social, and legal environment. A one-size fits all approach will therefore not be sufficient.

Building social acceptance of management strategies requires an understanding of what communities value about their landscapes. Also important is how those values are shaped by wildfire management strategies. This project uses a variety of methods to gauge the economic, social, and cultural impacts of fuel treatment programs.

Objectives

• Build landscape-specific co-produced social science knowledge to management of wildfire risk.
• Assess the economic, social, and cultural impacts of fuel treatment programs in select landscapes.
• Work with public, private, and tribal organizations to build a shared understanding of the structure and functions of these systems.
• Identify existing fire adaptation strategies that can inform future agency investments.
• Innovate new, socially relevant and legitimate opportunities to further fire adaptation across boundaries.
• Assess landscape-specific capacities for implementing fuels management and other wildfire risk mitigation strategies.
• Integrate findings across study sites and geographies.
• Develop strategies for monitoring and evaluating improvements in local fire adaptive capacities over time.

Expected Results

Outputs

• A forest management infrastructure and capacity assessment for engaging in the 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy.
• Communication tools including white papers, journal articles, briefs, webinars, presentations, workshops.
• Collaboratively developed visions and scenarios of each landscape incorporating a range of climatic, landscape, and social conditions.
• Tribally relevant best practices, performance metrics, recommendations and decision support tools for fire planning.
• Participatory GIS maps that link needs, visions, and values across each landscape by key attributes.
• Visualizations of desired landscape conditions, key resources, and areas with more and less consensus around key treatments to help assist managers on the ground.

Expected Outcomes

• Improved wildfire reduction capacity for forest managers, including Tribal and co-stewardship/shared stewardship partners.
• Improved decision making at local, regional and national levels by considering a more complete set of existing conditions, values and future visions.
• Use participatory GIS maps that link needs, visions, and values across each landscape for decision-making.
• Managers will use visual representations of desired landscape conditions and key resources to inform planning and implementation decisions.

Metrics of Success

• Greater understanding and acceptance of fuel management treatments to reduce wildfire risks by local communities and communities of interest.
• Better relationships between forest managers stewardship partners and community members to facilitate implementation of fuel management strategies.

Geographies and High-Risk Landscapes to Be Addressed

Regional

Work is focused in the west and interior west of the U.S. where the Wildfire Crisis Strategy landscapes have been identified. Ultimately results of the research have implications for implementing fuel treatments on a national scale.