Скачать или смотреть Integrating Seasonal Dynamics into Risk-Informed Wildfire Planning: December 11, 2025

Delivered by Jamie Peeler

Risk-informed wildfire planning tools such as Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) and Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessments (QWRAs) have grown in popularity and are now used locally, nationally, and internationally. Forest and fire managers use these tools to plan where to coordinate during a wildfire incident and support decisions that protect people and ecosystems during a time of increasing wildfire activity. However, because the tools were originally developed for wildfire incidents, the fire behavior modeling and functions that guide them are based on summer conditions when unintentional ignitions are most common. This focus limits their ability to represent spring and fall conditions when managers apply prescribed fire and excludes seasonal patterns that influence resources that people value across the landscape. To address these limitations in the Colorado Front Range, our team has updated the fire behavior modeling to include a broader range of seasonal conditions and is developing a recreation archetype that captures how people use the landscape throughout the year. Together, these updates demonstrate the value of expanding risk-informed wildfire planning to include a wider set of fire scenarios and account for seasonal dynamics.