Wildfire decision support tools: barriers, facilitators, and future directions for effectiveness

Abstract

Background: Decision support tools (DSTs) play an important role in all stages of wildland fire management from pre-fire planning to post-fire recovery. Recent studies centering on how end users and practitioners use DSTs in the field have assessed the barriers, facilitators, and uses for a number of wildfire DSTs. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to evaluating wildfire DST effectiveness at improving decision quality. We turn to the larger natural resource management literature on decision support to argue an effective DST is one that improves decision quality through either decision-relevant information or decision structuring. To define decision quality and understand how wildfire DSTs may contribute to decision quality, we conduct a review of the qualitative social science literature on wildfire DSTs (n = 13, USA, Canada, and Australia) and supplement with relevant grey literature (n = 14, USA). We summarize barriers, facilitators, and uses. Results: We find that key barriers include communication failures, cultural barriers, landscape characteristics, and resource, capacity, and user issues. Key facilitators include prior awareness, cultural beliefs, formal training, interpersonal relationships and trust, sufficient resources and capacity, and user-friendliness. We find that practitioners use DSTs for both decision tasks (e.g., articulating objectives, assessing tradeoffs) and non-decision tasks (e.g., knowledge confirmation, documentation). Conclusion: We conclude by suggesting future research should more explicitly focus on DST effectiveness, and we provide examples of how to translate existing criteria of DST effectiveness to two wildfire DSTs: Risk Management Assistance (RMA) and the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP).