Impacts of wildland fire effects on resources and assets through expert elicitation to support fire response decisions
Colin B. McFayden A E , Den Boychuk B , Douglas G. Woolford C , Melanie J. Wheatley A and Lynn Johnston D
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services, Dryden Fire Management Centre, 95 Ghost Lake Road, PO Box 850, Dryden, ON P2N 2Z5, Canada.
B Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services, 400 – 70 Foster Drive, Sault Sainte Marie, ON P6A 6V5, Canada.
C Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada.
D Natural Resources Canada, Great Lakes Forestry Centre, 1219 Queen Street East, Sault Sainte Marie, ON P6A 2E5, Canada.
E Corresponding author: Email: colin.mcfayden@ontario.ca
International Journal of Wildland Fire 28(11) 885-900 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF18189
Submitted: 15 February 2018 Accepted: 02 July 2019 Published: 19 September 2019
Journal Compilation © IAWF 2019 Open Access CC BY-NC-ND
Abstract
A modelling framework to spatially score the impacts from wildland fire effects on specific resources and assets was developed for and applied to the province of Ontario, Canada. This impact model represents the potential ‘loss’, which can be used in the different decision-making methods common in fire response operations (e.g. risk assessment, decision analysis and expertise-based). Resources and assets considered include point features such as buildings, linear features such as transmission lines, and areal features such as forest management areas. Three categories of fire impacts were included: social, economic and emergency response. Category-specific scores were determined through expert elicitation and then adjusted to account for fire intensity. Expert elicitation was shown to compare favourably with other methods in terms of the complexity, time, set-up cost and operational use. When compared with historical fire data from Ontario, it was found that impact model scores were associated with the objective to suppress or monitor fires. The model framework provides a consistent pre-fire impact assessment to support individual fire response decisions. The impact assessment can also represent the total impact for areas of Ontario that do not have prescriptive response in a formal fire response plan.
Additional keywords: decision-making, Delphi technique, forest fire, RamPART, risk, values, wildfire.
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