decision making

After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re-evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington.

There is increasing discussion in the academic and agency literature, as well as popular media, about the need to address the existing deficit of beneficial fire on landscapes.

Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century.

In the United States, many decision support tools exist to provide fire managers with weather and fire behaviour information to inform and facilitate risk-based decision-making. Relatively little is known about how managers use these tools in the field and when and how they may serve to influence decisions.

US fire scientists are developing Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations, also known as ‘PODs’, as a pre-fire season planning tool to promote safe and effective wildland fire response, strengthen risk management approaches in fire management and better align fire management objectives.

Purpose of Review The objectives of this paper are to briefly review basic risk management and analytics concepts, describe their nexus in relation to wildfire response, demonstrate real-world application of analytics to support response decisions and organizational learning, and outline an analytics strategy for the future.

Boundary organizations facilitate two-way, sustained interaction and communication between research and practitioner spheres, deliver existing science, and develop new, actionable scientific information to address emerging social–ecological questions applicable to decision-making.

There is broad recognition that fire management in the United States must fundamentally change and depart from practices that have led to an over-emphasis on suppression and limited the presence of fire in forested ecosystems.

Scientific knowledge and tools have central roles in contemporary federal forest programs that promote restoration in large landscapes and across ownerships. Although we know much about the role of science in decisionmaking and ways that science can be better linked to practice, we know less about manager perspectives about science and science tools, and the perceived role of both in planning.

Wildfires bring stark attention to interactions among climate change, fire, forests, and livelihoods, prompting urgent calls for change from policy-makers and the public.