Logo image
Integrated spatial fire and forest management planning
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Integrated spatial fire and forest management planning

Mauricio Acuna, C Palma, W Cui, D Martell and A Weintraub
Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Vol.40(12), pp.2370-2383
2010
url
https://doi.org/10.1139/X10-151View
Published Version

Abstract

Forest management planners usually treat potential fire loss estimates as exogenous parameters in their timber production planning processes. When they do so, they do not account for the fact that forest access road construction, timber harvesting, and silvicultural activities can alter a landscape's vegetation or fuel composition, and they ignore the possibility that such activities may influence future fire losses. We develop an integrated fire and forest management planning methodology that accounts for and exploits such interactions. Our methodology is based on fire occurrence, suppression, and spread models, a fire protection value model that identifies crucial stands, the harvesting of which can have a significant influence on the spread of fires across the landscape, and a spatially explicit timber harvest scheduling model. We illustrate its use by applying it to a forest management unit in the boreal forest region of the province of Alberta in western Canada. We found that for our study area, integrated fire - forest management planning based on our methodology could result in an 8.1% increase in net present value when compared with traditional planning in which fire loss is treated as an exogenous factor.

Details

Metrics

3 File views/ downloads
398 Record Views

InCites Highlights

These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web Of Science research areas
Forestry

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#13 Climate Action
#15 Life on Land

Source: InCites

Logo image