Forests, rangelands, and other open spaces provide a broad array of
ecological benefits, including critical habitat for protected
species, drinking water, wood products, carbon storage, and scenic
and recreational opportunities. Large, destructive wildfires
threaten these values and communities adjacent to these lands.
Large investments in wildland fire suppression and fuel reduction
activities are being made throughout the United States in ongoing
efforts to reduce human and ecological losses from wildfire (USDA
and USDI 2001; Public Law 108-148 2003; Sexton 2006). Managing
these investments is a challenge to multiple Federal, State, and
local agencies as decision makers attempt to reduce wildfire risk
over extensive areas while balancing public expectations with
finite budgets (Agee 2002; Dicus and Scott 2006; Johnson and others
2006; Sexton 2006; Winter and Bigler-Cole 2006). Landscape-scale
changes in vegetation structure and fuel loadings must be
accomplished in order to significantly alter wildfire behavior,
reduce wildfire losses, and achieve longer-term fire resiliency
(for example, Agee and others 2000; Finney 2001; Peterson and
others 2003; Graham and others 2004). However, the most efficient
way to achieve these long-term landscape goals remains unclear, and
there are different perceptions on the relative role and
effectiveness of management activities versus natural and managed
wildfire to reduce fuels (cf. Agee 2002; Finney and Cohen 2003;
Reinhardt and others 2008). The FLAME Act of 2009 requires the U.S.
Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the U.S. Department of
Interior to submit to Congress a Cohesive Wildfire Management
Strategy. In this report, we explore the general science available
for a risk-based approach to fire and fuels management and suggest
analyses that may be applied at multiple scales to inform
decisionmaking and tradeoff analysis. We discuss scientific
strengths and limitations of wildfire risk assessment frameworks,
including the benefit of broad scalability as demonstrated by four
recent case studies. We further highlight the role of comparative
risk assessment, which extends the analysis to include the decision
space available to managers and stakeholders to allow them to
explore the tradeoffs between alternative courses of action. We
identify scientific limitations of the analytical protocol and
discuss questions of how to better address climate change, smoke
modeling issues, and socioeconomic vulnerability, and how to better
quantify treatment effectiveness. Key challenges are: achieving a
balance between retaining analytical flexibility at regional and
sub-regional planning scales while simultaneously retaining data
and methodological consistency at the national scale, and
identifying and aligning regional and national priorities to inform
multi-objective strategy development. As implementation proceeds,
the analytical protocol will no doubt be modified, but the contents
of this report comprise a rigorous and transparent framework for
comparative risk assessment built from the best available science.
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