Berkeley Forests

In this report, we present a monitoring framework designed to measure and communicate the impact of management on multiple dimensions of wildland (and wildland-urban interface) fire resilience. First, to guide the scope and choice of metrics, we synthesize several different efforts that characterize multiple aspects of fire resilience, resulting in the following categories for monitoring: Wildfire Risk, Vegetation Health, Water Resources, Air Quality, Habitat Availability, Carbon Storage, Recreation, Cultural Resources, Local Economies, and Vulnerable Communities. We give example policy objectives for each of these goals. We then articulate a framework for thinking about possible measurements of these aspects of resilience, in terms of how directly they attribute desired outcomes to management actions: Measurements can focus on effort, assessing how much work was done; on efficacy, assessing what was done and what the potential impacts could be; on effectiveness, assessing empirically whether the treatments achieved the intended result; or on efficiency, taking into account how much financial cost or labor was required for a given outcome. Outcomes can be demonstrated for specific treatment areas as well as their larger landscape context. Next, we summarize several methods of identifying desirable target ranges for these metrics. To guide practice, we then lay out a set of possible steps to report on the outcomes of wildland fire resilience treatments, based on the previous set of concepts. Finally, for two topic areas: 1) wildfire risk reduction in wildlands, wildland-urban interface, utility corridors, and road corridors; and 2) reducing vegetation stress in forests and shrublands, we illustrate the spectrum of ‘directness of attribution’ by giving examples of a set of metrics spanning that spectrum.