Rideout Douglas B, Ziesler Pamela S, Kernohan Nicole J
WESTFIRE Research Center, Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Colorado State University, 80523, USA.
WESTFIRE Research Center, Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Colorado State University, 80523, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2014 Aug 1;141:190-200. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.03.023. Epub 2014 May 27.
Assessing the value of fire planning alternatives is challenging because fire affects a wide array of ecosystem, market, and social values. Wildland fire management is increasingly used to address forest restoration while pragmatic approaches to assessing the value of fire management have yet to be developed. Earlier approaches to assessing the value of forest management relied on connecting site valuation with management variables. While sound, such analysis is too narrow to account for a broad range of ecosystem services. The metric fire regime condition class (FRCC) was developed from ecosystem management philosophy, but it is entirely biophysical. Its lack of economic information cripples its utility to support decision-making. We present a means of defining and assessing the deviation of a landscape from its desired fire management condition by re-framing the fire management problem as one of derived demand. This valued deviation establishes a performance metric for wildland fire management. Using a case study, we display the deviation across a landscape and sum the deviations to produce a summary metric. This summary metric is used to assess the value of alternative fire management strategies on improving the fire management condition toward its desired state. It enables us to identify which sites are most valuable to restore, even when they are in the same fire regime condition class. The case study site exemplifies how a wide range of disparate values, such as watershed, wildlife, property and timber, can be incorporated into a single landscape assessment. The analysis presented here leverages previous research on environmental capital value and non-market valuation by integrating ecosystem management, restoration, and microeconomics.
评估火灾规划替代方案的价值具有挑战性，因为火灾会影响广泛的生态系统、市场和社会价值。野火管理越来越多地用于森林恢复，而评估火灾管理价值的务实方法尚未得到开发。早期评估森林管理价值的方法依赖于将场地估值与管理变量联系起来。虽然这种分析合理，但过于狭隘，无法涵盖广泛的生态系统服务。火灾 regime 条件类（FRCC）指标是从生态系统管理理念发展而来的，但它完全是生物物理的。其缺乏经济信息削弱了它支持决策的效用。我们提出了一种方法，通过将火灾管理问题重新构建为派生需求问题，来定义和评估景观与其期望的火灾管理条件之间的偏差。这种有价值的偏差为野火管理建立了一个绩效指标。通过一个案例研究，我们展示了整个景观的偏差，并对偏差进行求和以得出一个汇总指标。这个汇总指标用于评估替代火灾管理策略在将火灾管理条件改善到期望状态方面的价值。它使我们能够确定哪些场地恢复起来最有价值，即使它们处于相同的火灾 regime 条件类中。该案例研究场地例证了如何将广泛不同的价值，如流域、野生动物、财产和木材等，纳入单一的景观评估中。这里提出的分析通过整合生态系统管理、恢复和微观经济学，利用了先前关于环境资本价值和非市场估值的研究。
