| Strategic management of wildlands for fire is increasingly a mix of traditional fire science, climatology and human perceptions. Not only must managers be expert at modeling fuels and fire behavior, they must also understand human behavior, and the effects of climate on landscapes. We hypothiszed that areas in national forests differ spatially in their importance to stakeholders, including both the public and land managers. That this difference is based upon the inclusion of factors not typically found in wildland fire models. To test this hypothesis we used a multidimensional approach to assess the spatial variability several factors including recreation, property values and fuel moisture. This approach combined a geographic information system with the analytic hierarchy process to predict and test the current distribution of areas in national forests important to stakeholders.; Inclusion of stakeholders appears to improve the validity and useability of a spatial decision support system. Comparing the model created in this dissertation with several others demonstrates that it is important to strike the right balance between stakeholders and technical experts when designing and creating a model. It is always beneficial, however, to a significant level of stakeholder involvement.; Areas important for fire mitigation efforts depended on the stakeholder or audience rating the model. Raters from the U.S. Forest Service tended to favor areas with high fire probability scores, while those from the Park Service prefered recreation areas and places people value. In both cases, locations people had easy access to, such as along roads and trails were favored.; These results confirmed the hypothesis that areas of importance are different based on the individual rating the model. Further testing and refinement of the model includes expanding the study area beyond the southwestern United States as wells as obtaining better sources of data with finer spatial resolutions. |
