Spatial Allocation of Market and Nonmarket Values in Wildland Fire Management: A Case Study

We developed a methodology to evaluate the efficacy of fuel treatments by estimating their costs and potential costs/losses with and without treatments in the San Jacinto Ranger District of the San Bernardino National Forest, California. This district is a typical southern California forest complex containing a large amount of high-valued real estate. We chose four sites to represent different land use types – real estate, mixture of real estate and wilderness, recreation use and non-use. Within each site, we iteratively ran the FARSITE fire simulation model using different random starting locations and weather scenarios. Weather data for the simulations was extracted from both a remote automatic weather station data stream and a high-resolution weather model. These simulations were repeated to incorporate simulated fire suppression and fuel treatments. We define heuristics for simulating suppression tactics based on actual fire line production rates. Fire suppression resources were simulated and incorporated into the fire spread simulations. We simulated fuel treatments by applying collected treatment data over the landscape and adjusting fuel models using ArcFuels, a GIS-based fuel management and risk assessment tool. The economic value of each land-use type in the San Jacinto wilderness was estimated spatially using tax assessment data, recreation values, and water resource values. Costs of suppression and treatments were estimated from actual data.