As trends continue with larger and more catastrophic wildfires, there is an immediate need to reevaluate how agencies and organizations plan and mitigate for wildfire risk in the United States. There are several institutional and regulatory constraints that have driven wildfire management to be reactionary, site-specific, and confined to administrative boundaries. From high fuel loads to climate change, the conditions of wildlands require a paradigm shift to landscape-level planning, multi-jurisdictional coordination, and comprehensive regulatory compliance. There are a number of proven strategies to achieve this, including: (1) using assessment tools to identify constraints and project opportunities at a regional scale; (2) preparing programmatic wildfire management plans to provide regulatory compliance over a large area, thereby reducing the need for site-specific analysis and allowing for faster, more coordinated, and broader-scale implementation; and (3) incorporating more specific regional fire management into federal land management plans.

A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies. Efforts to apply these tools through workshops and engagement exercises provide opportunities to explore and highlight measures, indicators, and data sources for characterizing benefits and tradeoffs in collaborative environments involving interdisciplinary planning teams. Conceptual modeling tools are applied to a case study examining the social and economic benefits of recreation on the Ashley National Forest. The case study illustrates how these types of tools facilitate dialog for planning teams to discuss alternatives and key ecosystem service outcomes, create easy to interpret visuals that map details in plans, and provide a basis for selecting ecosystem service (socio-economic) metrics. These metrics can be used to enhance environmental impact analysis, and help satisfy the goals of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 2012 Planning Rule, and shared stewardship initiatives. The systematic consideration of ecosystem services outcomes and metrics supported by this approach enhanced dialog between members of the Forest planning team, allowed for a more transparent process in identification of key linkages and outcomes, and identified impacts and outcomes that may not have been apparent to the sociologist who is lacking the resource specific expertise of these participants. As a result, the use of the Ecosystem Service Conceptual Model (ESCM) process may result in reduced time for internal reviews and greater comprehension of anticipated outcomes and impacts of proposed management in the plan revision Environmental Impact Statement amongst the planning team.