GeoLCES: Geospatial support for evaluating wildland firefighter lookouts, communications, escape routes, and safety zones

Abstract

Wildland firefighters play a critical role in managing the complex relationship between humans and fire. To reduce the inherent risks that come with this role, firefighters use safety protocols such as lookouts, communications, escape routes, and safety zones (LCES). Currently, LCES implementation is conducted on the ground with limited support from geospatial information, despite the protocol's inherently spatial nature. This study introduces GeoLCES: an analytical framework designed to enhance LCES implementation using remote sensing and geospatial modeling. GeoLCES comprises three spatially explicit safety metrics, derived from airborne lidar data: (1) visibility index (VI), which quantifies landscape-wide visibility, aiding the evaluation of lookouts and communications; (2) escape route index (ERI), which quantifies mobility, facilitating the identification of escape routes and avoidance of entrapment-prone area; and (3) proportional safe separation distance (pSSD), which quantifies the relative degree of sufficient fuel separation, enabling the identification of suitable safety zones. In this study, we describe the theory, computation, application, and interpretation of each of these three metrics as a multivariate, pre-fire decision support tool. To highlight implementation on a useful scale, we map GeoLCES at 30m resolution throughout Gila National Forest in New Mexico, USA. We provide an operationally relevant use-case demonstration to exemplify one approach for employing GeoLCES at the incident level. GeoLCES is the first geospatial analytical framework that seeks to specifically address the complex, multivariate nature of LCES in a holistic manner, and has the potential to improve wildland firefighter safety at a time of increasing fire management demands.