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Overview of the WALTER Project

Wildfire Alternatives (WALTER) is a multifaceted initiative designed to facilitate strategic planning for wildland fire management. WALTER combines biophysical and social science with advanced geospatial, decision-support, and interactive web technologies to build integrated decision-support tools for use by experts and by the public. The primary goal of WALTER is to improve understanding of the interactions among climate, fuels, fire history, and human factors that produce different kinds and levels of fire risk, and to devise innovative ways to deliver information derived from this understanding to those who need it.

Wildfire plays a crucial role in ecosystem sustainability across much of the United States. However, decades of fire suppression, combined with periodic climatic stresses and changing land use patterns have converged to produce highly hazardous conditions. On federal lands alone, between 1994 and 2000, an average of 93,273 fires burned per year. The fires burned an average of 4,228,459 acres each year. Suppression costs over the same time period averaged $541,855,075 each year, with the first billion-dollar fire season registered in 2000.

These trends are nowhere more apparent than in the Western United States. Explosive population growth across the West and related increases in economic activity are making significant contributions to the nature and extent of fire risk. The urban-wildland interface in particular poses serious challenges to managing resources in fire-prone environments. Immediate conditions such as fuel availability and moisture levels, daily temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and wind conditions may drive fire incidence in particular places at particular times. However, seasonal-interannual-decadal climate conditions, vegetation dynamics, and human activities influence fire regimes over longer time periods and larger geographical areas. Integrating climate, human factors, and fire history with fuels information opens new avenues to learning how to live with and manage wildland fire.

The results of WALTER research will feed into designing the first phase of an integrated model called Fire, Climate and Society (FCS-1) that links human dimensions and natural science GIS submodels into a comprehensive model that allows assessment of fire hazard consequences for ecosystems and human systems arising from the interactions of climate, human activity, and biophysical processes.