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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100431

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Browsing Faculty Publications by Author "Gannon, Benjamin M., author"

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    A geospatial framework to assess fireline effectiveness for large wildfires in the western USA
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020-08-18) Gannon, Benjamin M., author; Thompson, Matthew P., author; Deming, Kira Z., author; Bayham, Jude, author; Wei, Yu, author; O'Connor, Christopher D., author; Fire, publisher
    Quantifying fireline effectiveness (FLE) is essential to evaluate the efficiency of large wildfire management strategies to foster institutional learning and improvement in fire management organizations. FLE performance metrics for incident-level evaluation have been developed and applied to a small set of wildfires, but there is a need to understand how widely they vary across incidents to progress towards targets or standards for performance evaluation. Recent efforts to archive spatially explicit fireline records from large wildfires facilitate the application of these metrics to a broad sample of wildfires in different environments. We evaluated fireline outcomes (burned over, held, not engaged) and analyzed incident-scale FLE for 33 large wildfires in the western USA from the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons. FLE performance metrics varied widely across wildfires and often aligned with factors that influence suppression strategy. We propose a performance evaluation framework based on both the held to engaged fireline ratio and the total fireline to perimeter ratio. These two metrics capture whether fireline was placed in locations with high probability of engaging with the wildfire and holding and the relative level of investment in containment compared to wildfire growth. We also identify future research directions to improve understanding of decision quality in a risk-based framework.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Mitigating source water risks with improved wildfire containment
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020-08-21) Gannon, Benjamin M., author; Wei, Yu, author; Thompson, Matthew P., author; Fire, publisher
    In many fire-prone watersheds, wildfire threatens surface drinking water sources with eroded contaminants. We evaluated the potential to mitigate the risk of degraded water quality by limiting fire sizes and contaminant loads with a containment network of manager-developed Potential fire Operational Delineations (PODs) using wildfire risk transmission methods to partition the effects of stochastically simulated wildfires to within and out of POD burning. We assessed water impacts with two metrics—total sediment load and frequency of exceeding turbidity limits for treatment—using a linked fire-erosion-sediment transport model. We found that improved fire containment could reduce wildfire risk to the water source by 13.0 to 55.3% depending on impact measure and post-fire rainfall. Containment based on PODs had greater potential in our study system to reduce total sediment load than it did to avoid degraded water quality. After containment, most turbidity exceedances originated from less than 20% of the PODs, suggesting strategic investments to further compartmentalize these areas could improve the effectiveness of the containment network. Similarly, risk transmission varied across the POD boundaries, indicating that efforts to increase containment probability with fuels reduction would have a disproportionate effect if prioritized along high transmission boundaries.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Prototyping a geospatial Atlas for wildfire planning and management
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020-08-20) Thompson, Matthew P., author; Gannon, Benjamin M., author; Caggiano, Michael D., author; O’Connor, Christopher D., author; Brough, April, author; Gilbertson-Day, Julie W., author; Scott, Joe H., author; Forests, publisher
    Wildland fire managers are increasingly embracing risk management principles by being more anticipatory, proactive, and “engaging the fire before it starts”. This entails investing in pre-season, cross-boundary, strategic fire response planning with partners and stakeholders to build a shared understanding of wildfire risks and management opportunities. A key innovation in planning is the development of potential operational delineations (PODs), i.e., spatial management units whose boundaries are relevant to fire containment operations (e.g., roads, ridgetops, and fuel transitions), and within which potential fire consequences, suppression opportunities/challenges, and strategic response objectives can be analyzed to inform fire management decision making. As of the summer of 2020, PODs have been developed on more than forty landscapes encompassing National Forest System lands across the western USA, providing utility for planning, communication, mitigation prioritization, and incident response strategy development. Here, we review development of a decision support tool—a POD Atlas—intended to facilitate cross-boundary, collaborative strategic wildfire planning and management by providing high-resolution information on landscape conditions, values at risk, and fire management resource needs for individual PODs. With the atlas, users can rapidly access and assimilate multiple forms of pre-loaded data and analytics in a customizable manner. We prototyped and operationalized this tool in concert with, and for use by, fire managers on several National Forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains of the USA. We present examples, discuss real-world use cases, and highlight opportunities for continued decision support improvement.