Economic decision making in active pre-fire management and alternative approaches in initial attack fire simulation modeling.
详细信息
文摘
The first section of this dissertation incorporated variable human perspectives on the effectiveness of prevention expenditures into wildland fire management and decision making. A Perspective Index (PI) was defined to quantify alternative perspectives on the effectiveness of prevention efforts. After demonstrating the existence of optimization solutions to an economic decision-making in active pre-fire management, different beliefs with respect to the effectiveness of prevention efforts held by pessimists and optimists were shown to cause the variety of sub-optimal management outcomes. Both pessimistic and optimistic stable sub-optimal solutions that perspectives defined were at higher total losses than the social average solution. Two dominant prevention strategies were reviewed: prescribed burning and biomass harvesting. Providing economic incentives for renewable energy, biomass harvesting was preferred in a pre-fire management regime by assuming positive net profit from harvesting, transportation, and energy generation. This study portrayed biomass harvesting as an active management approach created an economic incentive for fire managers to become aggressive performers rather than budget consumers.;The second section of this dissertation addressed the tradeoff in initial attack fire simulation modeling between model simplicity and credible representation of a complex process. In order to explore whether complex treatments of the stochastic processes are necessary, three processes were analyzed by alternative simulations: multiple fire occurrences, fire rate of spread, and tactics. While different representations of multiple fire occurrences have similar impact on the simulated acres burned and number of escaped fires (ESLs) for the two ranger units examined; different representations on rate of spread (ROS) and tactics have significantly different impacts on the acres burned and ESLs.