With Vibrant Planet, you can bring your collaborative priorities and pragmatic realities in combination with our data and algorithms to generate powerful prioritized scenarios.
Using planning areas and Distinct Management Areas (DiMAs) you can target and specify your plans. By emphasizing management objectives, you can prioritize projects that enhance the resilience of the landscape values that matter most to you, while analyzing the benefits of those projects on other landscape values. Finally, the platform allows you to bring in real life constraints such as the number of acres you plan to treat or dollars you can spend (ForSys constraints Ager et al., 2012). These constraints are then used to generate and prioritize projects across your planning area.
Add Planning Areas and DiMAs
The first step to creating a scenario is to determine your planning area. The planning area is the boundary of analysis and scenario planning. There are three ways to add a planning area in the platform:
- Planning area library - select a pre-loaded, commonly used area boundary, as well as pre-built polygons added or drawn by you and your partners from the planning area library.
- Upload - upload your own shapefile boundary and choose whether to share the boundary with the rest of your partners.
- Draw - draw your own boundary using the draw tool in the platform and determine whether to share the boundary with the rest of the collaborative.
After you have created a planning area, you may choose to add DiMAs for a number of purposes. You can add DiMAs using the three methods described above. You will have the opportunity to emphasize objectives differently in each DiMA, turn off DiMAs so that they are not included in the scenario, and restrict management options for each DiMA.
Emphasizing Objectives
In the platform you have the opportunity to emphasize your management objectives. There are eight objectives that have sliding scales for you to adjust from zero (no impact) to five (maximum impact). Zero means that the Objective will not impact where projects are generated when creating a scenario, while five means that an Objective would have a maximum amount of impact on determining where projects are built. Emphasizing an Objective at a five means that it is weighted five times as much as an Objective with a weight of one. These emphases impact the Resilience Opportunity (RO) across your planning area. The platform calculates an emphasized RO score for each management unit within the Planning Area based on your advanced settings and emphasized objectives.
As you toggle Objective weights you are able to visualize the impact that new weight has on the emphasized opportunity, emphasized wildfire risk, and emphasized value by selecting from the right-hand panel under ‘Opportunity and Risk’. These visualizations represent the real-time calculations of weighted-sum RO on a per acre basis. In the case of Emphasized Opportunity, darker blue shaded areas represent higher Opportunity per acre, while lighter shades reflect areas with lower Opportunity.
Polygons that have a zero or negative weighted-sum of Emphasized Opportunity will not be displayed, as they are excluded from any scenarios generated using that set of Objective weights. Zero or negative RO may occur due to a lack of relevant Strategic Areas, Resources, and Assets (SARAs) in those polygons, lack of wildfire hazard, lack of feasible management options, or a negative impact from the selected treatment (net for all Objectives weighted). Sometimes SARAs within the emphasized Objective(s) will be sparse, especially in small Planning Areas with limited SARAs present. If no management units have positive RO for the chosen Objectives, a notification message will display; polygons with positive Objective-weighted RO are required to proceed to scenario building.
Add Scenario Constraints
After you have emphasized objectives for the planning area or each DiMA you will need to provide constraints on the size and/or cost as well as number of projects in order to create a scenario which includes prioritized projects that most effectively achieve your management objectives. Entering the size or cost field at the maximum possible value leaves that factor unconstrained during Scenario optimization. We recommend that you constrain by either project size or cost (not both) as a starting place. These constraints are part of the ForSys algorithm, developed by the U.S. Forest Service and designed to facilitate multi-criteria, spatially explicit planning.
Scenario Generation
Your scenario constraints, along with the emphasized opportunity, for each management unit in the Planning Area are passed to the ForSys algorithm to build projects that optimally group adjacent management units to maximize the RO for each project. The Vibrant Planet platform is capable of analyzing prioritization problems at multiple scales ranging from planning areas to districts, forests and regions. In the platform, each project grows in size until reaching one of the constraints that you select: either acreage per project or budget per project.
The result from generating a scenario is a set of projects, based on the number of projects you specified, that maximizes RO while meeting the specified constraints. The project areas are visible to you in the platform, where each management unit is shaded by its Emphasized Opportunity relative to the other polygons within the same project. Learn more about how to review scenario details here.