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The U.S. Forest Service is responsible for developing tools to facilitate effective and efficient fire management on wildlands and urban-wildland interfaces. Existing GIS-based fire modeling software only permits estimation of the costs of fire prevention and mitigation efforts as well as the effects of those efforts on fire behavior. This research demonstrates how the economic benefits of fire management strategies also can be incorporated into a GISbased planning structure. In this paper, spatially delineated wilderness recreation values are derived by allocating per-trip values for...

In this study, we consider fire behavior simulation in tropical island scenarios such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The development of a system to provide real-time fire behavior prediction in Hawaii is discussed. This involves obtaining fuels and topography information at a fine scale, as well as supplying daily high-resolution weather forecast data for the area of interest. FARSITE, the fire simulation program we use, works with the fuel models commonly found in the contiguous United States, so vegetation found on an island needs to be mapped to fuel models accordingly. We examine a...

The National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indices deduced from the monthly to seasonal predictions of a meteorological climate model at 50-km grid space from January 1998 through December 2003 were used in conjunction with a probability model to predict the expected number of fire occurrences and large fires over the U.S. West. The short-term climate forecasts are ongoing experimental products from the Experimental Climate Prediction Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The probability model uses nonparametric logistic regression with spline functions for evaluating...

Unlike most hedonic studies that analyze the effects of a one-time event, this paper analyzes the effects of forest fires that are several years apart in a small geographical area. We find that repeated forest fires cause house prices to decrease for houses located near the fires. We test and reject the hypothesis that the house price reduction from the first fire is equal to the house price reduction from the second fire. The first fire reduces house prices by about 10%, while the second fire reduces house prices by nearly 23%, a statistically significant difference.

People living in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are at greater risk of suffering major losses of property and life from wildfires. Over the past several decades the prevailing view has been that wildfire risk in rural areas was exogenous to the activities of homeowners. In response to catastrophic fires in the WUI over the past few years, recent approaches to fire management and prevention in the WUI have emphasized activities that can be taken by landowners and communities to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. These activities include fuel reduction via mechanical thinning and...

We estimate a marginal benefit function for using prescribed burning and mechanical fuel reduction programs to reduce acres burned by wildfire in three states. Since each state had different acre reductions, a statistically significant coefficient on the reduction in acres burned is also a split sample scope test frequently used as an indicator of the internal validity of contingent valuation surveys. In this paper the dichotomous contingent valuation method is used to test for scope of the sensitivity of respondent's willingness to pay for prescribed burning and mechanical fire fuel...

Fire management inherently involves the assessment and management of risk, and decision making under uncertainty. Although organizational standards and guides are an important determinant of how decision problems are structured and framed, decision makers may view risk-based decisions from a perspective that is unique to their background and experience. Previous research has shown that individual differences in risk attitudes of fire managers exert a significant effect on fire management practices. Within the USDA Forest Service, Extended Attack (EA) incidents are those not contained...

This paper traces the origin and evolution of the application of nonmarket valuation techniques to fire management within the USDA Forest Service. The motivation for contingent valuation (CVM) studies that quantify existence value is traced to the need for monetary benefits of protecting spotted owl old-growth forest habitat from fire in the early 1990s. Two large scale general public surveys successfully demonstrated that CVM could be used to estimate both state level and national level benefits for fire prevention and fire suppression of endangered species critical habitat. By the late...

This paper reports on methods for representing and modeling fire incidents based on concepts and models from the decision and risk sciences. A set of modeling techniques are used to characterize key fire management decision processes and provide a basis for incident analysis. The results of these methods can be used to provide insights into the structure of fire management decision making, including key decision drivers and influences. The methods are applied to two fire incidents to illustrate the various phases of fire management decision making. Both applications identify critical...

Interactions between resident and exotic species have been shown to control the biotic resistance of communities to invasion. With different life stages of the exotic species, each sequential interaction may dampen or strengthen previous ones, thereby influencing invasion success. We assessed the effects of resident vegetation type on the arrival and performance of Triadica sebifera (Chinese tallow), a widespread invader in freshwater floating marshes, using a combination of field studies and glasshouse experiments.Our results indicated that Triadica abundance was positively associated...