Institutional factors affecting the use of decision support tools and ecological data in fuels management at the project planning level in the US Forest Service
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This paper reports preliminary findings from continuing
research on institutional factors affecting the use of decision support tools
and ecological data in fuels management project planning level in the US Forest
Service. Methods from the disciplines of 
Workplace Studies and Ethnography for
Information Systems Design were employed to investigate fuels management and
planning on three National Forests in the USFS Region 1. Since the fires of
2000 and the inception of the National Fire Plan, fuels management has become a
central concern. Fire and fuels policies emphasize landscape-scale fire risk
reduction, ecological sustainability and increased accountability for
prioritization and accomplishments. This has led to a fundamental change of the
roles of fuel managers at the local level. This change is characterized by a
shift from a supporting role based primarily on experience and professional
judgment, to one of leadership in the identification of project purpose and
need requiring formal scientific analysis. A vast array of new decision support
tools, data sets and assessment methods continue to become available to assist
fuels managers in their new role (e.g. FIREMON, FlamMap, LANDFIRE and FRCC).
The development of these tools has been accompanied by the implementation of
new planning authorities (e.g. the Categorical Exclusion, HFI and HFRA) and new
accomplishment reporting requirements (first in NFPORS, now in FACTS). The
interrelationship between these various factors influencing the actual practice
of fuels planning is complex and often leads to contradictory outcomes. This
research suggests that the importance of scale (resolution and extent of
characteristics or factors of interest at multiple levels) is as crucial for
understanding and managing the institutional dimensions of fuels management as
it is for understanding and managing the biophysical factors of fire behavior
and ecological processes. It is critical that the interactions of the numerous
institutional dimensions across multiple organizational levels be understood
and managed if the national fuels program is to achieve coordinated landscape
scale fuels management.
Principal Investigator: Erik Hakanson
