The ForSys Research Consortium

The Scenario Investment Planning Platform provided the Forest Service with tools to identify cross-boundary management priorities as part of the shared stewardship initiative. Scenario planning tools are an essential part of building consensus among landowners as a way to expand the restoration footprint to achieve desired outcomes on the ground.

Landscape management has been the ideal for decades yet was very difficult to conceptualize until now. Through ForSys, we can plan and act at scales that will create resilient ecosystems for myriad species to inhabit, and for communities to remain vibrant.

The ForSys Model and its accompanying Scenario Investment Planning Platform played a pivotal role in the formulation of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. It equipped Forest Service leadership with the essential spatial blueprint needed to both initiate the project and secure the requisite funding. Beyond this achievement, ForSys holds vast potential for myriad other applications within the agency, particularly in the realms of strategic planning and policy formulation.

UC Berkeley’s class in Forest Ecosystem Management and Planning featured the application of the ForSys Scenario Planning Model. The primary learning outcome of the class was to have student teams develop Regional Priority Treatment Plans that met the goals set by California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. This real-world planning exercise required students to wrestle with the necessary trade-offs involved in prioritizing treatments across the landscape. With the help of the ForSys development team, the class learned how to implement the latest Windows version of the ForSys module. The ability of the software to optimize treatment goals and project spatially explicit treatment plans enabled student groups to evaluate the efficacy of multiple scenarios. The ensuing debates helped students work through the difficult task of balancing competing goals to produce plans that delivered a mix of ecosystem services that best met local needs. UC Berkeley plans to continue its educational partnership with the ForSys team as part of its efforts to provide the next generation of forest planners with tools able to inform landscape scale treatment plans.

We used the ForSys model in the state of New Mexico to identify the highest priority areas for forest restoration in our state. The visual display of specific opportunities for multi-objective and cross-boundary management made it easy to communicate to stakeholders and policy makers, and the entire analysis was included in the State Forest Action Plan Appendix. We found this analytical approach allowed for a more collaborative process when determining resource priorities and identifying priority landscapes.

We used ForSys to prioritize portions of Potential Control Lines (PCLs) across eastern Washington; typically roads, rivers and ridgelines identified by fire managers as likely locations for fire control. We used ForSys to rank segments of PCLs that have a greater benefit for fire managers, given their proximity to highly valued resources and fire likelihood. This ranking can be used by managers to prioritize on-the-ground assessments outside of the fire season to determine whether fuel treatments are needed and during the fire season as part of incident management planning.

The prioritization of fire risk reduction treatments in Mediterranean regions poses a significant challenge for managers and stakeholders. Our studies show how ForSys can be used to analyze colocation opportunities between competing objectives, and results such as fuel treatment maps can be readily translated into management projects. Integrating environmental and operational restrictions with this tool is a straightforward process.

ForSys allowed us to take into account spatial treatment priorities, treatment thresholds, and activity constraints, and to identify optimal fuel treatment locations. Our work confirmed the potential of ForSys in informing wildfire prevention and land management strategies and providing useful data and maps to forest and land managers.