Decision Modeling for Analyzing Fire Action Outcomes

principle of multiple use management of the Nation's forest resources for sustained yields of wood, water, forage, wildlife, and recreation. Through forestry research, cooperation with the States and private forest owners, and management of the national forests and national grasslands, it strives—as directed by Congress—to provide increasingly greater service to a growing Nation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race part of an individual's income is derived from any public assistance program. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of program information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.) should contact USDA's TARGET Center at (202) 720-2600 (voice and TDD). A methodology for incident decomposition and reconstruction is developed based on the concept of an " event-frame model. " The event-frame model characterizes a fire incident in terms of (a) environmental events that pertain to the fire and the fire context (e.g., fire behavior, weather, fuels) and (b) management events that represent responses to the fire environment. The model defines a sequential set of event-frames according to temporal and contextual factors (e.g., management processes) that yield a visual representation of an incident decomposition. The set of event-frames decomposes an incident into discrete units of analysis that can incorporate other models or processes (e.g., decision analysis) to describe decision elements of a fire incident. Based on the reconstructions reported here, we find that decision processes differ according to the incident and its events. From the reconstruction of the Old Fire, we identified how some incident decisions are actually legacy decisions. These are for anticipated incidents–ones for which even extreme occurrences have been envisioned and action contingencies established. From the reconstruction of the Fork Fire, decision modeling revealed that local knowledge plays a key role in early management stages as well as in management decisionmaking several days into an incident. Our analysis reaffirms that although fire is a continuous , exponential process that changes seamlessly, if abruptly at times, management is a discrete process that changes linearly and in discontinuous stages with the intention of avoiding a purely reactionary management response. However, this fundamental incompatibility between fire as a nonlinear, continuous process and management as a linear and discontinuous one means that discontinuities in management processes may impede management performance. Summary Although the vast majority of wildland fires are suppressed effectively in …