PODs Revision & Expansion Virtual Workshop

We are excited to announce the upcoming Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest (ARP) Potential Operational Delineation, or POD Line Revision and Expansion Workshop! This process is a collaborative effort between the ARP and the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative (NCFC) with the goals of expanding the current POD network to facilitate cross-boundary fire and fuels planning and to revise the current PODs to reflect altered fuel conditions and to capture lessons learned over the past few years of POD utilization.

The workshop will be led by the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and will occur from November 6-9 starting with a kickoff Background Information Session on the 6th followed by geographically focused Mapping Sessions on the 7th, 8th, and 9th. The audience for these workshops is primarily agencies and organizations within the NCFC area with fire management responsibilities and knowledge of local fire behavior.

For the geographically focused Mapping Sessions, we’ve sent out invites to the geographically relevant fire response organizations—those with intimate knowledge of the landscape, roads and potential control lines, and how fire interacts with those features. Didn’t receive an invite? All are welcome to the Background Information Session on Nov. 6 from 1-3pm!

Questions? Please contact Ch’aska Huayhuaca at Chaska.Huayhuaca-Frye@colostate.edu

Background Information Session – November 6, 1:00-3:00pm

Where: Virtual only, via Teams (Join Teams Here)

Target Audience: Fire managers, interagency partners, line officers/Agency Administrators, and any NCFC partners interested in learning more about PODs and how they are developed.

Potential Operational Delineations, or PODs, are a spatial planning framework in which fire responders, resource managers, and other cross-jurisdictional partners bring their local knowledge to a process to identify spatial units or containers defined by potential control features, such as roads and ridgetops. Each POD may be summarized with relevant forest conditions, values at risk, and fire potential and used to pre-plan for wildfire across jurisdictions and at a landscape scale using a risk management approach. PODs are a central component of the NCFC’s emerging landscape spatial strategy, providing a basic building block of fuels treatment and vegetation management planning as we work to prepare landscapes to receive and recovery from inevitable wildfire. Partners of the NCFC have used the existing PODs network developed by the ARP to inform planning on numerous projects with multiple objectives. However, our PODs network was developed before the 2020 wildfire season and only covers the ARP’s jurisdiction. To be truly useful for cross-boundary planning, the network must be updated, refined, and extended off these federal lands. This series of workshops will allow us to collaboratively generate the spatial data we need to inform future all-lands planning before, during, and after wildland fire.

This introductory presentation will be approximately 1 ½ hours in length with Q&A to follow. The presentation will be fully remote via Teams and recorded. We look forward to your attendance and participation.

The links provided below are a relatively comprehensive look at the who, what, where and why of PODs:
• Rocky Mountain Research Station’s PODs overview
• The Path to Strategic Wildland Fire Management Planning