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Abstract
Few administrative units involved in wildland fire protection are islands unto themselves when it comes to wildfire activity and suppression. If not directly affected by the wildfire workload of their neighbors, they are affected by the availability of nationally shared resources impacted by wildfire activity at the regional and national scale. These external influences should be taken into account when local administrative units plan their presuppression organizations. Failure to account for the external influences of fire workload and resource availability can lead to incorrect assessment of local resource needs. Recent advances in fire planning technology funded by the National Fire Plan have made it possible to better account for these external forces. Testing this new fire planning technology on the Umatilla National Forest in eastern Oregon and Washington, we found common planning assumptions about the influences of external fire activity can lead to significant errors in estimating suppression program performance.
Parent Publication
Citation
Wiitala, Marc R.; Wilson, Andrew E. 2008. The importance of considering external influences during presuppression wildfire planning. In: Narog, Marcia G. 2008. Proceedings of the 2002 fire conference: managing fire and fuels in the remaining wildlands and open spaces of the Southwestern United States. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-189, Albany, CA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. 247-254
