Fast-tracking Information to Implementation for WCS landscapes: Making climate-informed co-benefit opportunities available to managers through a new module in the open-source, web-based Planscape tool

The magnitude and severity of disturbance in recent decades has led to concerted efforts among land managers and policymakers to increase the pace and scale of restorative and adaptive management across much of western North America. Despite these efforts, their is difficulty maintaining the levels needed to alter ecological trajectories and maintain ecosystem services in the long term. Identifying treatment priorities through a strategic planning process is not standard practice in affected regions, but locally done to serve specific management needs. To address the extent of current and future impacts from natural disturbances, managers and policymakers are shifting to coordinated planning efforts that can collectively build resilient conditions across landscapes and jointly address multiple barriers to implementation. Scaling treatment needs to regional landscapes requires transparent, flexible, and repeatable methods that can identify potential treatment areas where uncertainty in attaining and maintaining resilient conditions is low and anticipated benefits from treatments are high.

Incorporating climate change influences on species, disturbances, and environmental conditions is now essential at all levels of decision-making. However, planning efforts rarely include information about potential climate change impacts largely due to a lack of available methods. However, the velocity and direction of change will vary across a region, and as such, the immediacy of management need will also vary spatially. Knowledge of where areas of relative stability are anticipated can help allocate management elsewhere on the landscape, and in turn, knowledge of where conditions will likely move towards more desirable conditions may indicate areas with high likelihood of near-term management success in facilitating the development of those conditions. This project aims to provide, and improve upon, available tools to improve the management decision-making process, and to incorporate anticipated future climate data, so that management actions today, have a meaningful and lasting impact even in the face of changing climatic conditions.

Framework for Resilience foundation – We will use the Framework for Resilience as the foundation for each version of PROMOTe and the associated Planscape application, including representation of the 10 pillars by one or more metrics and use of the framework hierarchy as the foundation to make inferences about resilience.

Framework for Socio- Ecological Resilience

Three-level hierarchy for characterizing and assessing resilience:

⇒ Pillars (10)

          ⇒ Elements (20)

                         ⇒ Metrics

Regional Resource Kits (RRKs) - A coordinated program of high-quality, publicly available, data, information, and tools designed to aid regional partners address landscape restoration and reduce wildfire hazards. RRKs currently cover four regions: (1) Northern California, (2) Sierra Nevada, (3) Central California, and (4) Southern California, and will be revised based on user feedback.

Planscape - Is an open-source web-based decision application that has, and is, being developed using the current CA Regional Resource Kits (RRKs) to enable landscape planners to define treatment areas and treatment types. The program allows users to better understand the management needs within their program areas, explore management outcomes, and identify priority project areas by linking data layers with the open-source Forest Service ForSys optimization model.

PROMOTe - The PROMOTe module will be an open-source tool enabling Planscape users to evaluate costs and benefits associated with management options and use condition representations and climate-informed management opportunities as inputs or summarize them as outputs during planning. The module enables joint assessments of ecosystem services provided by the Pillars of resilience to determine where conditions are currently in favorable condition, but where climate may provide an impediment to sustaining them on the landscape in the currently, and in the future.

Objectives

1. Enhance the statistical foundation for representing co-benefits and climate-informed management opportunities in the PROMOTe model.
2.  Apply the upgraded PROMOTe 2.0 model outputs across the western US (including all WCS landscapes) using national open-source data (i.e., develop a prototype US West Resource Kit).
3. Incorporate upgraded PROMOTe 2.0 model outputs into California’s Regional Resource Kits.
4. Generate new ecoregional-scale resource kits and associated PROMOTe 2.0 outputs for Central Washington (WCS) and the Southwest (encompassing Enchanted Circle WCS and Rio Chama CFLRP). 
5. Planscape + PROMOTe 2.0 - Build a module for the open-source, web-based Planscape tool to translate raw data layers into climate-informed management opportunities and the ability for users to utilize the newly created resource kits for the Western US, and ecoregional Resource Kits for the regions in California, Central Washington, and the Southwestern US.

Application of Work

The wildfire crisis is indicative of changes that have occurred across landscapes over the past 100 years, coupled with climate change happening now and over the decades to come. There is a pressing need to improve prospects for near-term risk reduction and long-term resilience. Balancing these two interdependent objectives can be challenging and is often a source of concern, uncertainty, and friction across stakeholders and communities that slows implementation and progress.  The expected outcome of this project is to enhance the ability of stakeholders and communities to craft and document options for achieving multiple objectives, reducing uncertainty, removing some of the greatest barriers to progress in implementation and improved conditions.