Wildfire risk reduction in priority firesheds using Potential Operational Delineations (PODs)

The U.S. Forest Service calls on managers in national forests to ramp up the pace and scale of hazardous fuels removal across the Western U.S. through tree removal, prescribed fire, and careful management of naturally ignited wildfires. By preparing for and choosing the timing and placement of fire, we set the terms of risk reduction. Otherwise, large destructive wildfires burning under extreme conditions will do this work for us.

The potential operational delineations (PODs) process offers a framework that managers can use to more feasibly respond to this call. However, while PODs have supported pre-fire planning on more than 70 national forests, several enhancements to PODs data and tools will make them more accurate and place based. As wildfires trend more severe and less predictable, this project aims to improve upon and ground-test some of the best existing tools we have to manage fire, and ultimately, to reduce risks posed by wildfire and wildfire severity to the people, places, and natural resources we care about.

How PODs Work

The PODs process is an approach to pre-fire planning that is designed for collaborative use across large landscape areas, which often encompass multiple communities, jurisdictions, and ecological systems. It engages stakeholders across land ownership boundaries to ensure local ecological restoration and hazardous fuel reduction objectives are integrated into planning. 

Photo Credit

Image from USFS Monte Williams, printed in Thompson et al. (2022).

Highlighted PODs along a “ribbon” of strategically connected fuel treatments to reduce fire intensity and enhance containment opportunity. Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and surrounding ownerships. Inset shows the broader POD network across the landscape.

Creation of a POD network is integral to the pre-fire planning process. If a landscape were a jigsaw puzzle, PODs would be the interlocking puzzle pieces. Managers draw networks of POD boundaries along features that, during a wildfire or prescribed fire, can slow or help contain the spread of fire. Examples of these operational fire management containment features include roads, rivers, major ridges, barren areas, and waterbodies. This collaborative pre-planning exercise gets managers and stakeholders on the same page in terms of which structures and natural resources are most important to protect, and building these landscape features into fire management strategy enables managers to protect those important structures and natural resources more effectively. In addition to delineating PODs and identifying shared values, managers can determine where to take steps to enhance the function of these existing landscape features as fire control features. In some cases, enhancements to POD boundaries can create conditions for managers to use fire as a tool to reduce hazardous fuels and restore ecological health.

How PODs Can Be Improved

Overall, the PODs process represents an important shift toward a more structured, inclusive, scientifically rigorous, risk-based, and easily communicated framework for managing immediate risks to wildfire responder safety and protection of valued structures and resources across large areas. It also helps manage the long-term risk of increasingly severe and devastating wildfires. 

But, current risk assessment and POD delineation processes do not account for changing seasonal conditions such as moisture in green vs. dried grasses and incident-level conditions such as wind patterns on a specific ridgeline. Currently, models use burning conditions that are biased toward extreme fire behavior to better capture the expected effects of the 5 percent of large wildfires fires that burn under extreme conditions. Predictive models that use these assumptions are appropriate for long-term planning for extreme wildfire behavior, but they does not account for most fires and fire behavior that are less extreme. Specifically, current risk models are not appropriate for proactive management of prescribed burning or managing natural ignitions for future risk reduction. As a result, they hide potential opportunities to safely conduct prescribed burns, for example. With better documentation of seasonal variability and POD boundary conditions and updated modeling tools, managers can make decisions with more fine-tuned estimates of the risk posed to responders and communities by fire management activities. Improved tools could also inform how they prioritize hazardous fuels treatments when planning or responding to wildfire. 

Collaborative Research Across Three Priority Landscapes

The Forest Service has identified 21 priority landscapes with high risk of wildfire transmission to nearby communities, and the federal government has allocated funds for managers in these areas to conduct fuels treatments at a scale that can meaningfully reduce wildfire risk. Researchers aim to build a series of case studies where managers are engaging in planned activities intended to improve existing POD networks, risk assessments, and other risk analytics. They are working with partners on the following three WCS priority landscapes:

• Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) in Arizona
• Colorado Front Range in Colorado
• Central Washington Initiative in Washington

Researchers and their collaborators hope to reduce uncertainties in fire management and promote strategic use of mechanical and fire-based hazardous fuel reduction treatments. Reducing these uncertainties would enable managers to increase their use of planned and unplanned ignitions, when and where appropriate to increase the pace and scale of hazardous fuel reduction. Ultimately, this project supports aims to reduce the threats posed by large wildfires burning under extreme conditions.  

Three research teams will collaborate with managers and other stakeholders on each landscape to collect, process, and develop the landscape-level data needed to inform the project objectives below. Researchers will work directly with line officers, fire staff, fuel specialists, and resource managers across ownerships to co-develop tools that will help inform and communicate decisions around hazardous fuels mitigation work, prescribed burning, asset protection, incident response and fire management. Regular stakeholder meetings with research updates will support managers to use and integrate project data and products into fire and resource management programs across land ownerships.

Project Area Overview: This work supports engagement on three WCS landscapes: 1) The Central Washington Initiative, 2) The Four Forests Restoration Initiative, and 3) the Colorado Front Range. The focus of this work will be along the interface with landscape partners and areas of highest fire transmission potential.

Project Objectives

Assess how well existing POD networks function as fire control locations. This will inform how managers prioritize pre-season fuels treatment and support wildfire incidents. 

• Analyze empirical data from previous fire incidents to understand the role POD boundaries played in fire management drivers and outcomes.
• Independent data collection on and around POD boundaries to support analysis.
• Fire behavior modeling to identify treatment thresholds for different fire environment scenarios.

Determine which seasonal factors are appropriate to include as inputs in risk assessment models, such as Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessments. Risk assessments allow managers to consider the severity of potential tradeoffs when managing prescribed burns and wildfires.

• Address seasonal variation in wildfire hazard and risk.
• Include highly valued resources and assets that are currently missing or underrepresented, such as air quality, indigenous ecological knowledge.
• Integrate temporal variability, including immediate, postfire, and future fire risk, into risk assessments.

Assess the relative cost, effort, and feasibility of enhancing existing POD networks with fuels treatments that would enable more use of prescribed fire and other management actions intended to reduce the risk of wildfire severity and hazardous wildfire outcomes.

• Improve estimates of treatment cost and feasibility in locations throughout POD networks.
• Quantify the effort required to conduct fuels treatments that meet specific risk reduction objectives.
• Use updated risk analysis to help prioritize fuels treatment opportunities and challenges.

Products for Managers

Researchers will develop several products that managers can use to reduce uncertainties in fire management, strategically thin forests in preparation for more use of planned and unplanned ignitions, and reduce the threats posed by large wildfires burning under extreme conditions. These products can also be used to support NEPA planning.

Products will be map-based with specific additions that reflect the needs and ideas of resource managers and landscape partners. Some examples could include: 

• Scenario-based maps of expected POD performance, or fire containment, and risk summaries for all or a subset of highly valued resources and assets
• Near real-time risk estimates driven by forecast weather and local landscape conditions
• A hazardous fuel treatment prioritization and feasibility tool that estimates relative cost and opportunity of implementing treatments within POD networks

Once developed, the team will share the products through interactive workshops and trainings held with cooperators on each priority landscape.