Vibrant Planet allows you to focus the scenarios you create in the platform on your specific management goals through a number of user inputs.
The Opportunity Emphasis selector allows you to determine whether the scenario you are generating should be prioritized based on avoiding loss of value from hazard to Strategic Areas, Resources, and Assets (SARAs) through management options (risk reduction), providing ecological benefit through management options (Restoration Opportunity), or a balance between the two (Resilience Opportunity).
Calculating RO
The Stewardship Atlas (STELA) contains values for Treatment Effects (TE) and Change in Disturbance Effects (DE) by Objective (Product Guide Section 7 - Management Impact). The platform uses these as ingredients to generate metrics for each management unit, but whether they are included for optimization is informed by you. Resilience Opportunity is the default selection, and is computed as the sum of normalized Treatment Effects (TE) and normalized change in Disturbance Effects (DE).
Normalization
You also have the option to set a frame of reference for the planning area. Normalization is the data transformation process that puts each dataset on the same scale. Normalization is provided as an option because each Objective category may have very different Treatment Effect (TE) and Disturbance Effect (DE) scores for a number of reasons, such as:
- One Objective has more SARAs (see the right hand Data Layers panel) than another Objective.
- One Objective’s SARAs happen to be more colocated with areas of higher hazard than another Objective.
- One Objective’s SARAs happen to be more colocated with treatments that have a greater influence on reducing hazard than another Objective.
- One Objective’s SARAs happen to be more colocated with treatments that are beneficial for them than another Objective.
There are scenarios under which having values for each Objective vary greatly from one another could be problematic. For example, take a landscape where the Wildlands Health Objective only has one SARA associated with it, but the Biodiversity Objective has multiple SARAs associated with it. In a pre-normalized scenario, prioritization would nearly always be weighted toward areas with Biodiversity benefit simply because Biodiversity has more SARAs associated with it and likely greater values associated with TE and DE. To address this, TE and DE values for each Objective (across all management unit and treatment combinations within either the Landscape or the Planning Area, depending on your selection) are normalized to a common range.
When Landscape is selected as the frame of reference, it is not guaranteed that all Objectives will have the same normalized range, unless the Planning Area is generally representative of the distribution of TE and DE values for all Objectives in the Landscape. Depending on how the Planning Area is drawn, it may be an area that is relatively important for only a few Objectives; if this occurs and Landscape normalization is selected, then these Objectives will tend to dominate project development, even when other Objectives are weighed higher (see section below on weighing Objectives). It is possible that a Planning Area can be more important for some Objectives than others relative to the Landscape (ex: if the Planning Area primarily captures SARAs that only fall under one Objective).
Ultimately, the choice between Planning Area and Landscape Normalization may be reflective of funding sources or the types of stakeholders at the table. Trying out both methods, as the metrics are dynamically generated and easy to flip between, is encouraged.
Calculating Normalization
Objective TE and Objective DE values are converted to a standard scoring range for use in the treatment selection process and for you to interact with in the platform. This process is similar to one used in ForSys (U.S. Forest Service, 2017) for optimizing project development using several objectives with disparate units of measurement and ranges of values, such as minimizing cost and maximizing product removal.
The following steps are used to normalize, or rescale, TE and DE values within the Planning Area for scenario development, per Objective (again, separately for TE and DE):
- Determine the scaling factor: maximum of absolute values, dependent on your selection:
- Landscape: compute based on all units and treatments within the Landscape (include data outside the Planning Area).
- Planning Area: compute based on all units and treatments that fall within the Planning Area (subset to exclude data outside the Planning Area).
- Rescale values in the Planning Area: divide values by the scaling factor. The output is in units of value (possible minimum of -1, possible maximum of 1).
- Multiply by a constant of 500,000 (arbitrarily large scalar, used for visualization). The output is in units of value (-500,000 to 500,000).
The default selection for Normalization is Planning Area, which ensures that all Objective TE and DE used in scenario planning will be scaled within the same maximum range of -500,000 to 500,000.
Recommended Management
By default, all plausible management options are available for your planning area or DiMA. The Recommended Management section allows you to deselect certain types of projects according to your preferences. You may alter their selection by toggling the check boxes, updating the treatment selection within each polygon in real-time. You have the option to select or de-select different management options for each Distinct Management Area in the planning area.
