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| SPOTS
Pilot Project - Lessons Learned |
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Pilot Project Presentations:
Common Threads |
- Need better data to support
analyses
- Calibration step took a great deal of time and
effort (adjusting model inputs to obtain expected
fire behavior and spread).
- Important to involve the community
early and often, soliciting input regarding the “problem
fire” scenario and define the assumptions
to frame the analysis.
- Complex fire behavior modeling and
GIS skills in demand at local level; computer resources
often inadequate to produce model results within workshop
scope.
- Underestimated time needed to prepare
data and calibrate the models.
- Software design performance could
be upgraded to enhance user friendliness. Many models
still in development stage, so much “tweaking”
required to render them useful.
- National approach must incorporate
flexibility to allow management to account for regional
and local distinctions (ecological, economic, and
political).
- The presenters offered seven different
interpretations of the process outlined in the Fireshed
training, moving forward with the ideas rather than
adopting rote process, demonstrating the flexibility
of the SPOTS process for adapting to local needs.
- Integration across scales is critical
for integration across national, regional, local,
and project-level objectives.
- The problem fire is not limited to
ownership boundaries; therefore, need to include the
broad interagency community in SPOTS planning process.
- Fire Program Analysis (FPA) process
and guidelines should be incorporated into SPOTS approach
to strengthen a unified approach.
- Many teams identified a need to evaluate
multiple problem fire scenarios, not just a single
problem fire.
- SPOTS approach
allows the crafting of a realistic representation
of the cost or risk of “No Action” by
comparing fire behavior and forest growth model projections
under differing scenarios… including the “no
action” alternative.
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Challenges |
- Wildlife habitat recovery
plans and other resource issues often conflict with
hazardous fuel projects that would change the problem
fire threat at the landscape scale.
- Public resistance to
changes in the status quo and/or increases in prescribed
fire related smoke outputs is prevalent in many areas.
- The SPOTS process is
designed as a short-term, triage solution for identifying
high priority areas for treatment; however, limitations
related to funds and the physical ability to schedule
and complete projects restricts implementation of
the desired patterns across the country.
- Project performance measures
that focus solely on “target acres” may
not be appropriate for assessing the success of national
fuel treatment efforts. Managers are:
- expected to excel
in both outcomes and outputs,
- expected to balance
competing priorities and issues,
- held accountable
to the “how much” instead of critical
issues related to quality, longevity, and effectiveness
of treatments.
As a result, the funding for complex analysis and
work on more challenging high priority acres is often
shifted to the background.
- Access limitations and
steep slopes constrain realistic, economically viable
treatment options on a great deal of our public lands.
- Temporal and spatial
treatment design analysis displaying trade-offs between
differing action (and no-action) alternatives is critical.
Analysis tools allow us to communicate complex dynamic
processes.
- While a great deal of
biomass will be made available through fuel and vegetation
treatments, realistic opportunities to move this material
to markets are currently limited.
- The scarcity of people
with both spatial analysis skills and fire backgrounds
is a consistent barrier to using SPOTS at a national
scale. Employee development approaches and compensation
has not kept pace with current expectations. More
fuels analysts are required to keep up with an increasingly
software-oriented world.
- There are a confusing
number of models available; the optimal models must
be selected and integrated to form the national corporate
software package.
- The window for implementation
and the “shelf life” of treatments are
confounding. Challenges are temporal as well as spatial.
- Unstable budgets hamper
our ability to commit to long term programs of work.
In short, will we have dollars to finish what we start?
- SPOTS process needs integrated
and collaborative input from multiple resource specialists,
land owners, adjacent land management agencies, and
concerned parties. Problem fires are a symptom of
multiple issues related to ecology, society, economics,
and politics. For a solution, we must look beyond
fire and fuels.
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