Resolving future fire management conflicts using multicriteria decision making | JoVE Visualize

Area of Science:

Environmental Management
Ecological Risk Assessment
Decision Science

Background:

Wildfire management often relies on prescribed burning, which can conflict with human health and biodiversity conservation goals.
Increasingly complex fire regimes and human encroachment into fire-prone areas necessitate advanced decision-making tools.
Balancing societal objectives with wildfire risk reduction is a critical challenge in wildland-urban interfaces.

Purpose of the Study:

To apply a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach to complex wildfire management decisions.
To evaluate 22 planned burning options against eight objectives, including property protection, water quality, human health, and biodiversity.
To explore how different weighting methods within MCDA can resolve conflicts between management objectives.

Main Methods:

Utilized a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework.
Assessed 22 distinct planned burning scenarios.
Evaluated impacts across eight objectives: housing protection, water quality, carbon emissions, human health, and five species types (including arboreal mammals).

Main Results:

MCDA identified specific management options (e.g., burning forest near houses) that performed well across most objectives.
Conflicts were highlighted, particularly concerning arboreal mammal protection and water quality, depending on the chosen weighting method.
Additive weighting prioritized some objectives over arboreal mammal and water quality concerns, while multiplicative weighting sought to avoid any single poor outcome.

Conclusions:

MCDA effectively makes conflicts between wildfire management objectives explicit, aiding complex decision-making.
The choice of weighting criteria significantly influences the resolution of objective conflicts, with multiplicative weighting being crucial for preventing irreversible biodiversity loss.
Future research should focus on reducing outcome uncertainty and exploring management actions with more predictable results for effective fire management.