Calculating resilience opportunities on your landscape
Now that we understand risk, and the management options to increase resilience, let’s explore how Vibrant Planet optimizes risk reduction opportunities on your landscape.
Determining the Resilience Opportunity
To build a common operating picture, Vibrant Planet has calculated a Resilience Opportunity (RO) score for each management unit. To calculate this RO score each SARA in a unit is exposed to potential hazard to determine potential loss in value due to wildfire,, also known as risk. Each SARA is then exposed to all treatment types and the platform determines the management option that will most greatly increase the resilience to that SARA. See the diagrams and further explanation below.
The graph on the left shows the loss in value of a SARA following a wildfire (risk). The graph on the right shows the difference in SARA value following a wildfire with no treatment vs. with the most effective treatment selected by the platform. The difference between the two values is the RO score.
As shown in the graph on the right above, the Resilience Opportunity (RO) score is the difference between risk and the increase in value of the SARA from the best treatment option. The score is calculated for each SARA in a management unit and when multiple SARAs are present in a management unit, their scores are combined.
To the right is a visual display of the combined RO score of each SARA as a total RO score for each management unit.
Scaling RO
As mentioned above, Vibrant Planet calculates the RO for each management unit and displays these scores across your landscape. In the next section you will learn how weighing management objectives allows you to unlock the power of RO scores to meet your management goals.
Vibrant Planet calculates the RO for each management unit on your landscape and displays them landscape wide. These RO scores are used to prioritize management across the landscape.
Science Corner: Options for RO
In the platform, under advanced settings, you also have the option to emphasize different types of RO scores including:
- Resilience: the default considers both risk reduction and restoration when calculating the RO score for each management unit.
- Risk Reduction: RO scores that reflect only the opportunity to avoid negative effects of wildfire.
- Restoration: RO scores that only reflect treatment effects that have an increase in ecological function of biodiversity SARAs, regardless of the treatment effect on reducing the risk of wildfire. These scores do not reflect the opportunity to avoid negative effects of wildfire.