Data Pushers
It is fair to say that wildland fire management has grown increasingly complex over the last few decades. Changing climates, an expanding wildland-urban interface, and the ever-growing hazardous fuels problem have led to longer, more intense and more complicated fire seasons.
In a parallel development, technological advances have dramatically increased the amount and quality of intelligence that a fire manager can bring to bear on a given fire. Fire behavior modeling, geospatial analysis, remote sensing and weather forecasting are available today that would have been inconceivable 10 or even three years ago. Much of the new processes are being led by researchers at the U.S Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Despite the rapid changes that surround personal and professional lives, the Wildland Fire Situation Analysis has remained essentially unchanged for nearly three decades. However, a number of changes to this basic decision-support application for line officers in fire management are under way that signal a new era in wildland fire decision support.
Over the past decade many reviews of wildland fire business practices have highlighted concerns about the WFSA. The most recent was an after-action review by the national incident commander/area commander group following the busy 2006 fire season, reiterating some of the common concerns about the WFSA system. Foremost among the concerns was the view that the system was “broken” and that “the WFSA process has become a justification tool for expenditure of dollars without any real solid connection to strategy and tactics on the ground.”
The group recommended speeding up the development and implementation of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System, a project that incorporates a number of new technologies in decision support along with the possibilities for redefining how the entire decision process might be changed to improve its usefulness.
At the request of the wildland fire community and agency administrators — particularly the U.S. Forest Service — components of the WFDSS will be available online for this western fire season. In fact, some are required to be used on larger U.S. Forest Service fires of regional ($5 million total cost) and national significance ($10 million).
The decision-support system includes:
Fire Spread Probability is a spatial model that calculates the probability of fire spread from a current fire perimeter or ignition point for a specified time period. Inputs to the application are similar to the established Farsite application: surface fuel model, aspect, elevation, slope and canopy characteristics. These landscape characteristics are used in conjunction with historical energy release component and wind data from a representative remote-automated weather station as key model inputs. Through the use of high-end computers — four are online for this season and will be staged at a secure it center — WFDSS-FSPro can calculate fire spread probabilities out into the future. Projections can range from seven to 90 days. The current normal projection is for a 10- to 14-day period.
Rapid Assessment of Values At Risk is an economic process that uses the fire spread probability output from WFDSS-FSPro to provide inputs relative to the potential of a fire reaching identified areas of concern (structures, infrastructure, etc.) threatened by the fire, as well as assessments of non-monetary values such as critical habitat and cultural heritage sites. Working through a variety of partners — federal, state, and county estimated monetary values have been acquired for significant community assets. An indispensable partner in this process has been the Federal Geographic Data Committee Subcommittee for Cadastral Data in the Bureau of Land Management. This group has led the way in partnering with individual counties all across the West in an effort to share information that counties have gathered about their communities. (See “Calculated Risk,” March/April 2007, at www.wildfiremag.com for a more detailed description of FSPro and RAVAR).
The Stratified Cost Index is a performance metric that Congress began requiring federal agencies to use in 2006. It compares fire expenditures by projected final fire size, to historical fires within the same region and with similar characteristics. The comparison occurs by looking at information at the ignition point concerning fuels, aspect, elevation, ERC, distance to communities and other boundary issues relative to land-management allocation. A range of projected final fire sizes in acres can be used. The use of SCI outputs during an active fire is intended to help better inform the agency administrator and the incident management team when discussions occur on suppression costs and strategies.
Eventually, WFDSS will replace the WFSA and Wildland Fire Implementation Plan process, but for now fire managers are encouraged to use the online Wildland Fire AMR.
The Wildland Fire Appropriate Management Response site, www.wildlandfireamr.net, is essentially a turbocharged version of the stand-alone strategic assessment and implementation plan software. The system provides a number of features that make it a much more effective and efficient tool for decision support.
The online site facilitates communication and collaboration on the situation analysis and implementation plan. Now, fire managers can work with state, regional or national offices to collaborate on complex decisions and share risks more broadly through the management hierarchy. It also can speed up the process.
Ellen Bogardis-Szymaniak, a prescribed-fire and fuels specialist with the Superior and Chippewa National Forests, used the site to develop a number of situation analyses during the 2006 fire season.
“I work in northern Minnesota while my signing official is in Milwaukee,” she says. “When I was using the stand-alone WFSA software, we had to do a lot of converting files into different formats, faxing back and forth, etc. Completing the WFSA took up a lot of time. Using the online version was much quicker. If the signing official needed changes, we could do it together instantly online.”
Working online also provides other advantages. Users can search for other situation analyses and implementation plans completed in their area to compare how other managers have responded when faced with similar situations. Incident commanders, fire planners and other personnel can see information on the fire situation before they arrive on an incident.
Perhaps most importantly with the current emphasis on management efficiency and cost savings, online situation analyses and implementation plans allow regions and agency administrators to track key decisions and rationales that influenced them earlier in the process.
A number of the features on the appropriate management response Web site are notable improvements over the stand-alone WFSA/WFIP software. Using the site, it is no longer necessary to wake up the GIS specialist in the middle of the night; there is a user friendly mapping tool that allows a non-GIS-trained user to map fire perimeter, calculate acreages, and identify structures and other values at risk with a labeling tool. Fire perimeters and alternative situation analyses can be drawn on the map and become a part of the completed package.
“The WFSA has always had the problem of attempting to describe a spatial problem with text,” says John Szymoniak, business lead for the WFSA/WFIP applications and WFDSS. “The AMR mapping tool allows users to accomplish some basic, but powerful, mapping as a part of the process. It is very intuitive and can really help to communicate the fire situation.”
There also is the ability to pull data from a number of sources. Users can download weather data from local remote-automated weather stations, and a number of weather forecasting tools are linked through the site. The newest feature relative to weather is to easily access, graph and store into the final decision documents critical seven day fire weather forecast elements from the Western Regional National Weather Services National Digital Database.
Szymoniak sees the Wildland Fire AMR Web site as the first step in a process to move decision-support online. In the coming years, he believes the Wildland Fire Decision-Support System will become the primary tool and will replace the situation analysis and implementation plan.
“Everything is moving toward a Web application. It opens up the ability to use a wealth of tools and data that would not be possible on individual computers,” he says. “The potential to share in complex decision-making in an increasingly complex fire environment is extremely important.”
This year WFDSS-FSPro will be run by analysts trained at the Missoula Fire Lab. In the coming years, more and more of the controls will be handed over to users, but for now, users log on, create a profile and provide some basic descriptive information regarding a fire. From there, analysts will work with them to gather data, run the models and interpret the output.
Limited computing capacity requires that the system use priority settings. So, requests for WFDSS-FSPro or -RAVAR model runs are queued in the following order:
Fires of national significance,
Fires of regional significance, and
Other fires, including emerging episodes (widespread lightning ignitions) wildland fire-use and possibly prescribed-fire planning.
In 2006, features of the Wildland Fire Decision-Support System were used on 70 fires. While many of these were large fires in the first two categories, the system also was used on a number of smaller fires in California and the Pacific Northwest. Fire managers found that the system was useful in situations with lots of ignitions starting at once, requiring a prioritization process for distributing initial-attack resources and requesting outside resources for fires with the potential to become problem fires. Runs of the WFDSS-FSPro and -RAVAR models helped to prioritize the fires, provide long-term assessments, and do some “gaming” of different strategies and tactics.
Szymoniak says that the Wildland Fire Appropriate Management Response site and Wildland Fire Decision-Support System are the future of decision support. The sooner fire managers begin working online, the easier the transition will be down the road. During the 2007 fire season and beyond, fire managers across the country will have the opportunity to access these tools. As these online applications develop, there is no doubt they have the potential to transform many aspects of fire management decision-making and how these wildland fire business practices are accomplished.
“Decision support is about getting the right resources in the right place for the right reasons,” says Szymoniak. “These tools help facilitate that process and make it more transparent. We need to be able to improve the way we share and display the complex decisions that are made in the management of wildland fire.”
Josh McDaniel is the editor of Advances in Fire Practice, a subsite of the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center Web site, available at www.wildfirelessons.net/AFP.net.
Using historical data, SCI calculated expected suppression costs of large fires (larger than 300 acres) with similar fire characteristics such as fuel types, fire intensity, topography, region and values at risk. Actual expenditures on FY 2006 and future large fires will be compared to their “expected” cost as calculated by the SCI.
FSPro calculates the probability of fire spread from a known perimeter or point; a combination of RERAP and FARSITE. It provides long-term and strategic decision support. The model works by simulating thousands of fires with different weather scenarios using a minimum travel time fire-spread method.
RAVAR integrates directly with the FSPro model to identify values threatened by a fire. The structure layer of RAVAR is generated through county surveys and records. It also can include assessments of non-monetary values such as critical habitat or cultural heritage sites.
For more information on Wildland Fire Decision Support System, visit wfdss.nwcg.gov or contact Dave Calkin of the Rocky Mountain Research Station at 406-542-4151 or decalkin@fs.fed.us.
- Faster and more efficient than WFSA/WFIP software.
- Facilitates shared decision-making.
- Can search and view other WFSA/WFIPs.
- Integrated mapping tool.
- Weather data downloads.
- Updated, geographically specific costs-estimate database.
At www.wildlandfireamr.net you can search and view WFSAs or WFIPs already in system, load prep data, or begin a WFSA/WFIP for an incident.
Contact John Szymoniak at 208-387-5748 or jszymoniak@fs.fed.us for more information.
