Reference & Guidance

Introduction

This page includes a short list of documents, references, and guidance pertaining to wildfire decision support. The list is meant to be dynamic in nature and we will be making efforts to continually update the content on the page. If you have useful documents and/or links that you would like to share with the wildland fire community please contact us and we will work to add things.

Decision Making for Wildland Fire Incidents

  • “Decision making for wildfires: A guide for applying a risk management process at the incident level" has been published as a General Technical Report (GTR-298-2013) by the Rocky Mountain Research Station and is available in Adobe PDF format only, from tree search or here.
  • Risk Management Assistance (RMA) Dashboard and Sharepoint. RMA is designed to assist agency administrators/line officers and incident commanders by providing access to experienced line officers, personnel skilled in risk management, fire operations, and enhanced fire analytics to improve fire management responses through a risk informed process.
  • Incident Strategic Alignment Process Story Map (ISAP) 
  • ISAP Self Study Power Point 
  • WFDSS/ISAP Talking Points

WFDSS Related Documents

WFDSS has incorporated the Risk and Complexity Assessment Parts B-D with the application in the Relative Risk (Part B), Organizational Assessment (Part C) and Functional Complexity (Part D).  For more information in determining ratings for Part B - Relative Risk Assessment and Part C - Organization, click here for a document providing guidance on this analysis.

In rare cases the Wildland Fire Decision Support System may be unavailable, in these instances paper WFDSS is available here. Once WFDSS access has been restored the expectation is all information entered into the paper form will be entered into the application. 

Creating Incident Specific Objectives in WFDSS This document outlines some best practices for creating incident specific objectives (February 2019)

Wildland Fire Decision Support Tools Document

Numerous support tools for intelligence gathering and analyses are readily available to aid fire managers and administrators in making risk informed decisions. The tools described in this document range from simple and quick tools that are informational or only require basic fire behavior knowledge to run, to more complex programs that demand a high level of technical expertise to input, run, and calibrate. This is clearly a limited list however it will hopefully give you a place to start when looking for effective decision support tools. click here to open and view the full document.
 

NWCG Memos