COS 237-6 - Balancing ecological and social values in the prioritization of wildfire restoration on National Forest System lands

Abstract: In response to mounting wildfire risks across the continent, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been devising a strategy to dramatically increase fuels mitigation and forest health treatments over the coming decades to safeguard the ecological integrity of forests, minimize impacts to key ecosystem services, and protect communities from loss of life and property. While communities vary widely in their capacity to recover from wildfire, their vulnerability has historically been left out of the decision-making process when prioritizing areas for wildfire risk mitigation treatments. To aid in a more equitable and informed spatial prioritization of those treatments, we have developed a spatial model that aims to balance current wildfire risk and the social vulnerability of communities potentially affected by wildfire, while also considering the ecological value of, and ecosystem services provided by, forest ecosystems. We quantified wildfire risk by combining wildfire hazard potential with metrics on fire severity and shifts in vegetation regimes. Social vulnerability identified places where communities may be particularly impacted by, or least able to recover from, wildfire due to factors across key themes including demographics, community engagement and education, employment and income, and health status. Ecological value was represented by six indicators highlighting a location’s ability to support crucial ecological processes, and ecosystem services provided to communities were represented by quantifying the provisioning of clean drinking water and current carbon storage. We computed a composite index of wildfire risk, social vulnerability, ecological value, and ecosystem services and mapped this index onto National Forest System lands to highlight areas of greatest alignment of these values in relation to USFS wildfire risk mitigation and/or restoration efforts. To understand how the inclusion of social vulnerability influences wildfire treatment prioritization, we compared versions of our model with and without social vulnerability. We found that including a social component dramatically altered the spatial footprint of highly value-aligned areas. This highlights a need for greater consideration of both the vulnerability of communities to wildfire and their capacity to respond to its impacts when seeking equitable implementation of wildfire risk mitigation resources. An accompanying web app visualizing these data layers to aid practitioners in identifying high-value areas to prioritize will also be demonstrated. In its entirety, this model identifies areas that balance the varying human- and ecologically-based objectives that contribute to the USFS management decision-making process and can help inform prioritization for treatments now and into the future.