Wildfire Response Performance Measurement: Current and Future Directions

The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, defines success in the wildland fire response environment as “safely achieving reasonable objectives with the least firefighter exposure necessary while enhancing stakeholder support for our management efforts”. However, persistent information and knowledge gaps challenge the agency’s ability to measure success in coming fire seasons. In this paper, we outline a roadmap to help fill these gaps, describing progress towards developing meaningful fire response key performance indicators (KPIs). We focus on characterizing suppression resource use and effectiveness as requisite initial steps towards reducing unnecessary exposure. Our intentions are to articulate the rationale for embracing KPIs for fire response operations, briefly review best practices as they relate to organizational performance measurement, and describe recent and emerging analysis techniques designed to ultimately improve responder exposure assessment. Specifically, we review tangible research products that could be operationalized as KPIs in the near future, and illustrate their calculation and interpretation for a set of large fires that occurred in the U.S. in 2017. To conclude, we offer thoughts on productive pathways forward with performance measurement.

[1]  Crystal S. Stonesifer,et al.  Fighting fire in the heat of the day: an analysis of operational and environmental conditions of use for large airtankers in United States fire suppression , 2016 .

[2]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Analyzing Wildfire Suppression Difficulty in Relation to Protection Demand , 2018, Environmental Risks.

[3]  Patrick H. Freeborn,et al.  Towards improving wildland firefighter situational awareness through daily fire behaviour risk assessments in the US Northern Rockies and Northern Great Basin , 2017 .

[4]  Susan L. Roberts,et al.  Principles of Effective USA Federal Fire Management Plans , 2015, Fire Ecology.

[5]  Toddi A. Steelman,et al.  What is Limiting More Flexible Fire Management — Public or Agency Pressure? , 2011 .

[6]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Getting Ahead of the Wildfire Problem: Quantifying and Mapping Management Challenges and Opportunities , 2016 .

[7]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Quantifying the influence of previously burned areas on suppression effectiveness and avoided exposure: A case study of the Las Conchas Fire , 2016 .

[8]  Bret W. Butler,et al.  Safe separation distance score: a new metric for evaluating wildland firefighter safety zones using lidar , 2017, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[9]  Bret W. Butler,et al.  An empirically based approach to defining wildland firefighter safety and survival zone separation distances , 2017 .

[10]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  A review of challenges to determining and demonstrating efficiency of large fire management , 2017 .

[11]  Michael J. Jenkins,et al.  Wildfire’s resistance to control in mountain pine beetle-attacked lodgepole pine forests , 2013 .

[12]  Charles W. McHugh,et al.  Airtankers and wildfire management in the US Forest Service: examining data availability and exploring usage and cost trends , 2013 .

[13]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Estimating US federal wildland fire managers’ preferences toward competing strategic suppression objectives , 2013 .

[14]  Carl S. Spetzler,et al.  Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions , 2016 .

[15]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Rethinking the Wildland Fire Management System , 2018, Journal of Forestry.

[16]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Towards enhanced risk management: Planning, decision making and monitoring of US wildfire response , 2017 .

[17]  J. Pfeffer,et al.  Evidence-based management. , 2006, Harvard business review.

[18]  Kevin G. Tolhurst,et al.  Operational wildfire suppression modelling: a review evaluating development, state of the art and future directions , 2015 .

[19]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Risk Preferences, Probability Weighting, and Strategy Tradeoffs in Wildfire Management , 2015, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[20]  Bret W. Butler,et al.  A LiDAR-based analysis of the effects of slope, vegetation density, and ground surface roughness on travel rates for wildland firefighter escape route mapping , 2017 .

[21]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Application of Wildfire Risk Assessment Results to Wildfire Response Planning in the Southern Sierra Nevada, California, USA , 2016 .

[22]  Matthew P. Thompson.  Modeling Wildfire Incident Complexity Dynamics , 2013, PloS one.

[23]  David E. Calkin,et al.  Characterising resource use and potential inefficiencies during large-fire suppression in the western US , 2017 .

[24]  Tonja S. Opperman,et al.  LANDFIRE - A national vegetation/fuels data base for use in fuels treatment, restoration, and suppression planning , 2013 .

[25]  Francisco Rodríguez y Silva,et al.  A methodology for determining operational priorities for prevention and suppression of wildland fires , 2014 .

[26]  Matthew P. Thompson.  Social, Institutional, and Psychological Factors Affecting Wildfire Incident Decision Making , 2014 .

[27]  Lynn A Maguire,et al.  Managing Wildfire Events: Risk‐Based Decision Making Among a Group of Federal Fire Managers , 2011, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[28]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  The influence of incident management teams on the deployment of wildfire suppression resources , 2017 .

[29]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  An empirical machine learning method for predicting potential fire control locations for pre-fire planning and operational fire management , 2017 .

[30]  Geoffrey H. Donovan,et al.  The Effect of Newspaper Coverage and Political Pressure on Wildfire Suppression Costs , 2011 .

[31]  David E. Calkin,et al.  Econometric analysis of fire suppression production functions for large wildland fires , 2013 .

[32]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  The Exposure Index: Developing firefighter safety performance measures , 2011 .

[33]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Risk management: Core principles and practices, and their relevance to wildland fire , 2016 .

[34]  David Parmenter,et al.  Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing,and Using Winning KPIs , 2007 .

[35]  Matthew P. Thompson,et al.  Risk Preferences in Strategic Wildfire Decision Making: A Choice Experiment with U.S. Wildfire Managers , 2013, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[36]  Francisco Rodríguez y Silva,et al.  Contribution of suppression difficulty and lessons learned in forecasting fire suppression operations productivity: A methodological approach , 2016 .

[37]  Charles W. McHugh,et al.  Large airtanker use and outcomes in suppressing wildland fires in the United States , 2014 .

[38]  Charles W. McHugh,et al.  Modeling Containment of Large Wildfires Using Generalized Linear Mixed-Model Analysis , 2009, Forest Science.

[39]  Lynn A. Maguire,et al.  Can behavioral decision theory explain risk-averse fire management decisions? , 2005 .