Fire and Fuels Restoration Priority System

July 31, 2008

Identifying the most appropriate areas for forest restoration requires the consideration of numerous factors while also considering the impact on the greater landscape. Unfortunately there is currently no systematic, landscape scale approach to prioritizing forest restoration in the Northern Rockies other than the very coarse-scale USFS Integrated Restoration Priority System. The absence of a high resolution prioritization system creates problems when allocating funds, determining the most appropriate sites for restoration, or defending the location of a selected project.

In response, The Wilderness Society (a member of the Montana Forest Restoration Committee) has developed a tool that helps identify priority areas for forest and fire restoration efforts at the forest, district and watershed level. The tool uses a geographic information system (GIS) supplied with Forest Service data layers and provides a gradient of possible candidate stands across a given area or landscape that are ranked from low to high priority. The intent of this initial application is to prioritize the restoration of natural conditions in forests notably altered by previous stand management and years of fire suppression.

The tool will potentially serve as an integral component of helping identify sites appropriate for restoration and should have a number of benefits:

• A systematic and transparent approach and record to prioritizing restoration establishes credibility and provides a basis from which the choice of restoration project can be defended;
• An appropriately devised priority system will improve the potential for the survival of key species and legacy individuals (e.g. large old growth trees);
• Consideration of how projects could coalesce across a landscape because isolated restored forests will have little large scale ecological significance;
• Restoration of forests should be conducted with goal of creating the maximal acreage of contiguous landscape expressing natural structure, function and process;
• Maximize use of limited federal funds;
• Promote community discussion of the priorities used to select restoration projects.

Importantly, the central intent of this prioritization tool is not to select any individual stand for restoration, but to serve as an informative, transparent and coherent means of identifying candidate stands for restoration. This prioritization tool is complementary to, and serves in direct agreement with, the Montana Restoration Principles. The tool is also complementary to the USFS Integrated Restoration Priority System (IRPS) but is intended to function on a much finer scale. This draft tool is still in developmental stages and is absolutely open to suggestions and improvements. The tool is available as a companion to this summary in an ARC-GIS based format.