The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) is a web-based, software integration framework that manages pre-existing and newly developed software base models and their required data needs to analyze and support decisions about fuels management to mitigate wildfire risk. Extensive field user input resulted in the identification of five workflows:

(1) Prescribed Burn Planning and Plan Development: available in IFTDSS version 1.0 (January 2012). For a detailed description of this workflow and tutorials about how to use the workflow see the version 1.0 software at iftdss.sonomatech.com.

(2) Wildfire Hazard Analysis across a landscape of interest: available in IFTDSS version 1.0 Jan. 2012. For a detailed description of this workflow and tutorials about how to use the workflow see the version 1.0 software at iftdss.sonomatech.com.

(3) Landscape Wildfire Risk Assessment for Current Conditions: not yet available. This workflow is expected to be available with the release of version 1.2 (March/April 2012).

(4) Landscape Risk Assessment for Simulated and Treated Future Landscape Conditions: not yet available. This workflow is expected to be available with the release of version 2.0 (October 2012).

(5) Assessing Fuels Treatment Effectiveness over Time: not yet available. This workflow is expected to be available with the release of version 2.0 (October 2012).

What is a workflow? An IFTDSS workflow is defined as a user defined sequence of hazardous fuels reduction planning activities that result in the completion of a mission critical task. Many independently developed software tools are available to field users to assist in hazardous fuels reduction planning. These tools are isolated from each other. This means that they cannot easily share data among themselves nor is the data in the same format. The scope of these existing software tools is typically smaller than the scope of the mission critical task users needs to perform. This requires users to manually “string together” several of the existing software tools in an ad-hoc sequence. Users stressed the need to automate this sequencing of isolated software tools into a workflow that takes them from beginning to end of a specified task. Fuels specialists repeatedly said their job focus is to perform mission critical tasks such as Prescribed Burn Planning, Wildfire Hazard Analysis, or Wildfire Risk Assessment. They do not view their jobs as running particular software tools such as BehavePlus, FlamMap, FOFEM, Consume, etc.

A second set of users, however, expressed the need to be able to have access to existing software tools such as FOFEM, FlamMap, FCCS, Consume, etc. and run them easily to quickly get at a particular output set of data without following the entire sequence of steps that workflows entail. The advantage of using IFTDSS for these users is that many of the individual software tools they desire to run are all in one place, operating under a single user interface, and consolidated and coordinated data management processes. Therefore IFTDSS has been designed to accommodate both types of user needs.

For much more information about using IFTDSS, please register as a test user at iftdss.sonomatech.com.