5. Discussion

Figure 7. POD-level protection priority for F2F, dWUI, and both.

58 Environmental Risks

Two primary innovations we introduce here are the summarization of tSDI within various analytical units to determine differences in area-adjusted suppression difficulty, and the summarization of tSDI within PODs to determine protection priorities. Notably, we attempted to expand the concept of risk transmission to include opportunities to safely and effectively restrict fire spread across ownership boundaries. The incorporation of suppression difficulty and control opportunities has, to date, been largely absent from the literature on wildfire risk transmission. What we presented here ideally informs decisions related to the need for suppression where protection demand is high, as well as decisions related to the need for suppression where the potential for risk transmission is high.

There are a number of foreseeable near- and long-term extensions to this work. Perhaps most immediate, the analysis could be extended across multiple ownerships to create a common operating picture for co-management of risk. Models of fire spread and containment could be updated to account for suppression difficulty, and could be used to game out various scenarios and alternative response strategies [42]. Similarly, models designed to optimize initial attack response could be updated to account for variable suppression resource needs as a function of tSDI [43]. Calculating tSDI values under different weather scenarios could be informative for gaming out how suppression opportunities change with conditions, and could further serve as the basis for prioritization of fuel treatment investments designed to enhance suppression effectiveness [44]. Analysis of tSDI values along POD boundaries could identify potential weakness in the POD network, which could also help inform prioritization of fuel treatments.

Incorporating structure and watershed susceptibility to fire through more rigorous fire effects analysis, as well as incorporating fire likelihood, would likely allow for targeted identification of protection priority [41]. It is not necessarily the case that higher F2F importance weights imply higher potential for post-fire erosion, for example, or that higher mSDI values imply higher intensity fire leading to greater damage. Opting for more refined risk assessment of course comes with greater investment of time and resources, a tradeoff which must be evaluated in light of the marginal value that is added for decision processes [13]. This point encapsulates a common aspect of designing and delivering decision support, which is that modeling frameworks do not necessarily need to be complicated to demonstrate potential utility, and further that not every application requires a complicated solution. Lastly, the tSDI layers, along with the basic concept of suppression difficulty, could be broadened to include factors such as safety zones, egress routes, and the impacts of other disturbances on fire behavior and resistance to control [45, 46].

Author details

References

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\*, Zhiwei Liu<sup>2</sup>

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