A Powerful New Planning Environment for Fuels Managers: The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System

The Joint Fire Science Program, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group Fuels Management Committee, and Sonoma Technology, Inc. are unveiling the prototype of a new planning environment that will help fuels specialists negotiate the confusing array of planning tools. The new framework, dubbed the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System, or IFT-DSS, organizes fuels-planning software and data into a seamless user environment. IFT-DSS offers users access to powerful modeling software from within a well-designed, intuitive graphical user interface, and it provides a common platform for the further development of fuels-planning software tools. The name may not slide easily off the tongue—you might vocalize it as “Ifty-Diss”—but the framework itself promises to revolutionize the way fuels planners do their jobs. It will smooth and simplify the fuels-treatment decision process by minimizing planners’ struggles with unfamiliar models and hard-to-use databases. IFT-DSS will make fuels-treatment decision making less time-consuming, more scientifically rigorous, and easier to explain to stakeholders