Prioritizing restoration and risk reduction landscape projects with the ForSys planning system

Prioritization of restoration and risk reduction treatments has become increasingly important to address a wide range of emerging resource management issues on public lands in the United States and elsewhere. Prioritization often involves multiple objectives and is constrained by limited resources and by restrictions on where management can be directed. Successful prioritization plans help allocate limited resources, often at multiple scales, and communicate restoration plans and estimated outcomes to key stakeholders. ForSys was designed as a tool to integrate land management assessments into spatially-explicit prioritization strategies and predict outcomes. ForSys uses inputs on objectives, management restrictions, constraints, and treatment thresholds to organize stands into planning areas that are optimized for one or more objectives. ForSys can explore large arrays of management scenarios to reveal tradeoffs between different prioritization strategies and explore compromise solutions.

ForSys has been used in five different countries resulting in over 25 published case studies at scales ranging from watersheds to the continental United States, resulting in multiple federal records of decision and environmental management documents. Most recently, ForSys was used as the analytical tool to identify priority firesheds in the 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy and has been incorporated into external decision support tools such as Planscape, a cloud-based planning system that incorporates ForSysR. The ForSys Research Consortium (including educational institutions, nonprofit, for-profit, and state agencies) and the associated open-source code repositories were created to build a laboratory that includes educators, researchers, and practitioners with interests in the application of ForSys for scenario landscape planning.