Scenario Planning for Managing Fuels and Wildland Fire in an Era of Climate Change
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The National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis worked with the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center and officials from several national parks to plan a series of stakeholder workshops to explore future climate change scenarios and how these scenarios might impact wildland fuels and fire, vegetation, wildlife, visitor experiences, and other park processes and values. The workshop involved 10-15 managers, scientists and educators in the scenario planning process to help them apply the process in their own parks. The goal of the project was to develop and implement an effective mechanism for mutually engaging science, resource management, and education communities in preparing for and responding to climate change and its impacts on public lands. 
Climate change will bring highly consequential and unprecedented changes, but those changes cannot be predicted with enough accuracy and precision to guide traditional management approaches. Scenario planning does not lead to precise predictions of the future, but allows practitioners to explore the range of predictions and begin to think through what appropriate responses. This process helps identify win -win actions that can be taken regardless of the rate and magnitude of future change. In this way, using the best available science and decision-making criteria, fire managers can begin to develop both short- and long-term mitigation and adaptive management strategies that might reduce or prevent the most deleterious effects from the interactions between climate change and fire.
Project development
Rapid climate change presents significant threats to park resources and resource values. One of the processes affected by climate change is wildland fire. Recent research in the Rocky Mountains has demonstrated that the links between wildfire and regional patterns of climate change are related to temperature and moisture availability. In the west, earlier spring warming has resulted in earlier snowmelt and longer dry periods during summer, with recent decades being distinctly different from the early 20th century. During this time, fire seasons have been among the most severe, extensive, and expensive on record. While widespread media attention on wildfire has elevated public awareness and catalyzed management and policy responses, the links to climate change have generally not been made. Understanding how climate change and increased fire affect forest productivity, vegetative succession, wildland fuels, species persistence, and ecosystem processes have been identified as key challenges facing federal land managers (GAO Workshop on Climate Change and Federal Lands, November 2- 3, 2006, Washington D.C.). Managers need detailed knowledge about the consequences of changing fire regimes within their parks, which resources or ecosystem services are at risk, and how the system might respond to various policies and decisions.
Principal Investigator: Lee Macholz
Project staff: Leana Schelvan, Rachel Loehman
Project Partners: Leigh Welling, Climate Change Coordinator for the NPS
