Visual-SEVEIF: a tool for economic planning on wildfire decision-making

The quantification of wildfire impacts on natural resources or ecosystem services is an increasingly important demand of forest and land managers as well as of fire managers, due to it is a meaningful component of the vulnerability section of the risk assessment process. Ecosystem services are part of complex and integral systems in which everything is correlated. Therefore, the economic assessment of wildfire impacts requires an integrated approach, combining ecological, economic, and social considerations. The aim of this paper is to describe and detailed explain a methodological framework for assessing economic fire impacts on ecosystem services (tangible and intangible). Moreover, the suppression efficiency in large wildfires in Andalusia Region from 2011 to 2019 has been evaluated as an example of the utilization of the approach presented. SEVEIF model (System for the Economic Evaluation of Forest Fires) is proposed as the methodology to calculate potential losses on ecosystem services affected by wildfires. It incorporates the concept of net-value change, considering the pre-fire value of each resource and depreciation ratio based on fire behavior. Furthermore, SEVEIF model extends the economic assessment theory to economic vulnerability using time restoration or vegetation resilience (years needed for restoring the original resources values). Visual-SEVEIF is a tool to assist in the implementation of the SEVEIF model. It is downloaded for free (www.labif.es). This ecosystem service assessment support tool is useful in different decision-making approaches as preparedness, suppression and post-fire, predominantly regarding fuel treatment prioritization, cost-efficient management, and budget allocation.