Turning Wildfire Modeling into an Interactive Decision Tool
Wildfire mitigation decisions often come down to a deceptively simple question: how much difference will a fuel treatment actually make?
A proposed mowing treatment may look reasonable on a plan or map, but land managers and stakeholders need a way to understand how changing those fuels affects fire behavior under different conditions — comparing modeled outcomes like flame length, rate of spread, and crown fire activity across the same landscape.
We built the Fuel Treatment Explorer to make those comparisons easy to see, and we put it to work on a real analysis: a study of mowed fuel buffers on Broomfield, Colorado open space. What follows is that tool in action.
What’s under the hood
The Explorer isn’t a generic map viewer — it visualizes real fire-behavior modeling. Every scenario is produced with FlamMap, the USDA Forest Service’s industry-standard fire model, run on national-standard LANDFIRE fuel, vegetation, and terrain data — the same public dataset used across federal and state fire agencies.
That standardized foundation is deliberate: it’s what makes the workflow both credible and repeatable for any parcel or wildland-urban-interface corridor in the continental U.S. For a specific engagement, we sharpen those inputs with higher-resolution local data — LiDAR-derived fuels, current aerial imagery, field-verified vegetation — so the picture reflects ground truth rather than only the regional baseline. The tool stays the same; the precision scales with the data behind it.
From fire-behavior models to side-by-side comparison
Rather than presenting modeling outputs as isolated datasets or static maps, the Explorer places two scenarios side by side in synchronized maps — one primary, one comparison — so users can see exactly how modeled conditions change between them.
A draggable swipe control makes those differences easy to read. Users reveal more or less of either scenario and compare baseline conditions against a modeled treatment across the same ground.
Explore different treatments, weather, and fire behavior
Fire behavior depends on more than a single treatment decision — weather, vegetation, fuels, and terrain all shape the outcome. The Explorer lets users change those variables while keeping the comparison in one interactive environment. Users can select:
- Weather cases — examine fire behavior under different design conditions.
- Mowing scenarios — compare the unmowed baseline against treatment configurations.
- Fire-behavior metrics — flame length, rate of spread, and crown fire activity.
- Areas of interest — apply the same comparison workflow across different sites.
This makes it possible to move from a high-level view of a mitigation scenario to a focused look at how a specific aspect of fire behavior changes.
Putting the results in landscape context
A map of different fire-behavior outcomes is useful, but understanding why those patterns occur takes context. For each area of interest, the Explorer shows the pre-treatment distribution of fuel classes and can overlay the terrain that drives fire behavior:
- Fuel class distribution
- Slope
- Aspect
- Elevation
Instead of looking only at where flame length or spread rate changes, users can line those results up against the underlying fuels and terrain that explain the variation.
Built for two audiences at once
Wildfire modeling produces a lot of technical information, and the people in a mitigation conversation rarely have the same background. The Explorer addresses that directly with two ways in:
- Story Mode translates the fire behavior into plain language for residents, community groups, and decision-makers.
- Data Mode exposes the underlying zonal statistics for GIS teams and fire professionals who need the numbers.
The same analysis serves both — a common visual language for planners, land managers, and stakeholders to discuss modeled conditions and treatment strategies without interpreting a new interface for every site.
One workflow, any site
The Explorer is built around a consistent comparison workflow. Users switch between areas of interest while keeping the same visual approach and tools, so investigating a new site doesn’t mean learning a new interface. Treatment scenarios, weather conditions, fire-behavior metrics, and supporting landscape layers all stay part of one analysis process.
The result is a tool designed not simply to display wildfire modeling, but to make the effects of different fuel-treatment scenarios easier to explore, compare, and communicate — grounded in standard fire-science models and transparent, verifiable data.