The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (Cohesive Strategy) is a landmark effort to bring federal, state, tribal, municipal, and other agencies and organizations together to address  the nation’s wildland fire issues. At its core, the Cohesive Strategy strives to advance three primary goals:  restoring and maintaining resilient landscapes, creating fire adapted communities, and ensuring a safe and  effective wildfire response (USDA Forest Service and USDOI 2014). 


Achieving these goals begins with recognizing that wildland fire is a problem of coupled ecological and social systems. Separable components of the environment contribute to wildland fire issues, but the greater complexity arises in the interaction of biophysical and socioeconomic factors. The Cohesive Strategy also recognizes that wildland fire is unavoidable and in many cases essential to the health of the landscape.  The goal is not to eradicate fire, but rather to create ecological and social systems that can sustain and protect values at risk  in the presence of wildfire, i.e., maintain social and ecological resiliency.  


The Cohesive Strategy can be viewed as a grand social experiment to see if wildland fire can be managed more efficiently in line with social values and ecological realities. Judging success or even  progress toward the goals requires objective, quantifiable, and rigorous means of defining and measuring  landscape resiliency through time.  No such system currently exists. 


We propose to develop a set of empirical tools that can monitor all lands across the conterminous United States (CONUS) and provide an  integrated perspective on emerging ecosystem dynamics in concert with indicators of local socioeconomic conditions and land management activities. 


This project will build upon the extensive work completed by the National Science and Analysis Team (NSAT) supporting the Cohesive Strategy, major investments in landscape monitoring and technology development by the threat assessment centers and their collaborators, and recent advances in tracking and evaluating communities. 


The end goal is to provide managers with a set of accessible, cost ­effective tools for characterizing landscapes across multiple scales. We want to be able to measure the influence of management activities on landscape resiliency and adaptive capacity from both ecological and socioeconomic perspectives.