Abstract: Interactions between climate warming and human impacts to landscapes and ecological processes are leading to rapidly increasing scales and velocities of ecosystem degradation. The scale and complexity of the problem are major challenges to rapid and concerted management response. Some of the key components of responding to complex, multijurisdictional management problems include (1) efficiently incorporating stakeholder input and developing effective interfaces for client engagement; (2) generating relevant data and analytical outputs that can be understood and manipulated by managers and stakeholders alike; and (3) cogently prioritizing potential investments and actions. Land TenderTM (LT) is a cloud based, visual scenario-building and decision support application built to resolve these and other resource management issues at local, statewide, or national scales. LT is currently being applied in fire-prone forest-dominated Mediterranean- and temperate-zone ecosystems, in projects focused on ecological health and wildfire risk mitigation, but expansion to other ecoregions is planned. LT incorporates high-resolution data, disturbance simulations, and optimization routines to develop a comprehensive atlas of management scenarios for a given planning unit. Key steps are the development of the “stewardship atlas” and calculation of the “restorative return on investment”, which is the sum of treatment-driven avoided costs and direct treatment benefits. Climate change effects can be incorporated via climate scenario-driven changes to fire and drought occurrence and intensity, and by modifying site potentials in the underlying disturbance and succession model. Early generation of the stewardship atlas in the modeling workflow allows for preliminary management cost estimates to be produced well-before environmental assessment and implementation-contracting stages are reached, providing an earlier window than normal for procuring investment. The optimization function – built on the Ager ForSys routine – schedules treatments based on user-generated prioritizations of a set of broad “resilience” categories linked to strategic assets, resources and areas (“SARAs”), including, e.g., watershed values, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, economic outputs, forest resilience, and fire safety. Stakeholder participation occurs at a number of key stages in the workflow, and stakeholders can readily visualize scenario treatment tradeoffs, treatment prioritizations, and treatment sequencing. Finally, project collaborators can easily share and compare individual scenarios, thus arriving at consensus and/or a range of management alternatives quickly and efficiently. LT outputs include comprehensive spatial and tabular comparisons of final management alternatives – including projected costs and relative benefits of each alternative across all of the SARA resilience categories – that can be easily exported to environmental assessment processes that precede implementation.
