Background

Prioritizing investments in forest and fuel management projects and measuring outcomes from is a significant challenge for large, decentralized agencies like the Forest Service.

Over the past decade, numerous assessments of land conditions in terms of fuels, fire risk, watershed health, and terrestrial conditions have been completed. However, models or tools to integrate these assessments into prioritization strategies and measure outcomes do not exist.

The need for prioritization tools continues to grow as the agency is increasingly challenged to meet management targets while producing a wide range of ecosystem services, in coordination with partner agencies as specified in Shared Stewardship agreements.

Beyond using this system to examine agency priorities, scenario planning can be used to identify cross-boundary opportunities and prioritize activities to expand the scale of land treatments with stakeholders.