Overview and example application of the Landscape Treatment Designer

Ager, Alan A.; Vaillant, Nicole M.; Owens, David E.; Brittain, Stuart; Hamann, Jeff. 2012. Overview and example application of the Landscape Treatment Designer. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-859. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 11 p. The Landscape Treatment Designer (LTD) is a multicriteria spatial prioritization and optimization system to help design and explore landscape fuel treatment scenarios. The program fills a gap between fire model programs such as FlamMap, and planning systems such as ArcFuels, in the fuel treatment planning process. The LTD uses inputs on spatial treatment objectives, activity constraints, and treatment thresholds, and then identifies optimal fuel treatment locations with respect to the input parameters. The input data represent polygons that are attributed with information about expected fire behavior and the polygon’s overall contribution to one or more landscape management objectives. The program can be used in a number of different ways to explore treatment priority and decision rules that manifest themselves on large (1 million ha) landscapes as spatially explicit treatment strategies. This report describes the LTD program and an example application on the Ochoco National Forest. Further information including program download and a tutorial can be found at http://www.fs.fed.us/wwetac/ltd.