Valuing fire planning alternatives in forest restoration: using derived demand to integrate economics with ecological restoration.

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.

A new process for organizing assessments of social, economic, and environmental outcomes: case study of wildland fire management in the USA.

Ecological risk assessments typically are organized using the processes of planning (a discussion among managers, stakeholders, and analysts to clarify ecosystem management goals and assessment scope) and problem formulation (evaluation of existing information to generate hypotheses about adverse ecological effects, select assessment endpoints, and develop an analysis plan). These processes require modification to be applicable for integrated assessments that evaluate ecosystem management alternatives in terms of their ecological, economic, and social consequences.We present 8 questions that define the steps of a new process we term integrated problem formulation (IPF), and we illustrate the use of IPF through a retrospective case study comparing 2 recent phases of development of the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) system, a planning and budgeting system for the management of wildland fire throughout publicly managed lands in the United States.