Wildland Urban Interface issues continue to increase.

A mind map illustrates a collective view of complex factors influencing a core issue. Participants determinded the factors and pathways that represented their individual concerns and those developed in their stakeholder groups.

- Some assessment of conditions.

- Federal, state, and local efforts to improve awareness, training, and coordination.

- Some broad-scale public education programs.

- Federal fire policy provides direction concerning the WUI.

- Better clarify the federal fire policy concerning WUI issues.

- Incorporate WUI into land use planning and fire management planning.

- Train firefighters to work in interface conditions.

- Develop a clearer message to communities about WUI strategies.

- Increase in funding and fuels planning and treatments.

- Gradual increase in prescribed fire accomplishments.

- Assessment of fuel conditions, risks, and priorities vary nationwide.

- Southeastern states have enacted "right to burn" laws that protect prescribed fire activities.

- Federal Fire Science plan established.

- Fuel management strategies are being developed by various agencies.

- Public is more aware of and concerned about fuel management issues.

- Increase fuel treatment.

- Develop fire plans that support appropriate management actions.

- Establish a better understanding of fuel treatment alternatives in relation to science, politics, and social concerns.

- Better understand go/no-go decision conditions and options.

- Increasing regulatory requirements.

- Measuring smoke emissions.

- Controlling emissions through smoke management.

- Educating the public about regulations.

- Using dispersion models.

- Create better air quality monitoring.

- Establish better control measures.

- Develop better tools for predicting emissions and impacts.

- Make data easily available.

- Using outside research for system development and integration.

- Bringing information to the field through training.

- Increasing participation from other stakeholders and managers.

- Forming management alliances at regional levels.

- Develop an integrated system using existing models and data and apply it to a management decision system.

- Produce technology transfer from fire research.

- Find more money from nontraditional sources.

- Using pilot projects and demonstrations to help manage forests.

- Using prescribed fire as a long-term solution when we may need short-term solutions.

- Manage the land with a consistent purpose.

- Provide quality external and internal education programs.

- Determine accurate science-based programs for short- and long-term solutions.

- Moving from art to science in terms of fire behavior. Dealing with physical and social aspects of the wildland urban interface problem. Introducing local and regional fire modeling into fire operations.

- Coupling weather and fire modeling.

- Studying fire dynamics.

- Developing a physical understanding of satellite data.

- Build a perfect fire model.

· Understand how to implement an integrated fire-weather model anywhere.

- Develop physically-based satellite-derived data sets.

- Reorganize current knowledge and problems.

- Evaluate model-based predictions with real data for any time or place.

- Develop a feedback path from behavior to data to help understand fuel-fire links.

- Repackage existing knowledge for practical use by land managers and those in the field.

- Simulation modeling of forest fuels.

- Accomplishing many isolated studies.

- Recognizing that we have type conversion, exotic species, and structure changing fire regimes.

- Running static fuel models.

- Establish comprehensive dynamic inventories of the entire fuel profile (including grasses, shrubs, trees).

- Better understand historic conditions.

- Clearly communicate with fire managers and help them with biological applications.

- Increase the amount of ecological work on nonforest ecosystems.

- Producing demonstration projects.

- Accomplishing large-scale spatial assessments.

- Using fire as a restoration tool in local prescribed fire projects.

- Recognize variability.

- Communicate differences between restoration and commodity production.

- Integrate fire and other disturbances.

- Establish clear communication between researchers and managers.

- Starting to address ecosystem integrity.

- Increasing the amount of local fire projects.

- Beginning to define disturbance regimes.

- Accomplish long-term studies.

- Integrate fire into ecosystem management.

- Assess fire affects on biodiversity.

- Escalating concerns about restoring natural fire regimes.

- Increasing prescribed fire and fuel management treatments to affect fire hazard, regime, and restoration.

- Public resistance to fire hazard, smoke emissions, resources loss, and treatments.

- Lack of trust in government.

- Identifying knowledge about historic fire regimes in relation to vegetation and climate including human interventions.

- Gaining support, administratively and financially.

- Increasing the amount of monitoring, fuels mapping, and assessments.

- Linking fire management with land management plans.

- Increase training and professional development.

- Increase fire-history database compilation.

- Compile adequate vegetation maps.

- Engage in more long-term studies and experiments.

- Evaluate the cost and benefit of post-fire rehabilitation efforts.

- Evaluate the post-fire potential for mass erosion on regional and landscape scales.

- Develop more interagency cooperative research.

- Expand the study of exotics in relation to fire affects and behavior.

- Increasing social value of air quality at local and global scales.

- Escalating climate change.

- Increasing occurrence of prescribed and wildland fire.

- Continuing to develop dispersion models that are disjointed and lack clear guidance.

- Establishing many significant, joint problem-solving efforts.

- Producing a proliferation of meteorological models.

- Understanding better how weather and streams of mesoscale weather affect fire regimes.

- Creating source-strength models.

- Linking current meteorological, fire behavior, smoke production, and dispersion models.

- Better demonstrate how to use models and obtain technical support.

- Directly apply tools to land management projects.

- Increase model development rather than model system development.

- Expand public outreach for decision making.

- Increase collaboration between and among agencies.

- Foster university curriculum in mountain meteorology.

- Better understand the role of fire in increasing or decreasing carbon sink.

- Social components, which exist in all previously identified trends, are being recognized.

- Need for increased communication and collaboration is being recognized.

- Increasing need to understand how society drives wildland fire research.

- Recognizing that a significant amount of anecdotal social science evidence exists.

- Acknowledging the need to establish systematic social science research within fire management programs.

- Identify social science researchers and build a community.

- Obtain funding for social science research regarding fire research issues.

- Systematically identify social science research needs.

- Better understand how society influences wildland fire issues.

- Complete field visits to observe applied research; obtain feedback from field users.

- Identify fire lab customers and assess their needs.

- Integrate social science into fire research.

- Moving toward a balanced, national fire management program.

- Progress in developing the fire discipline and professionalism.

- Fire is in the mainstream of national and global ecosystem views.

- Taking a leadership role in interagency training and cooperation.

- The Incident Command System and all that has derived from it.

- Budget process is more cost efficient, unified, and interagency; Choosing-By-Advantage.

- Diversity in fire knowledge (physics, math, ecology, social science).

- Increasing use of risk analysis.

- Fire is included in other research communities.

- North American fire research community remains a world leader.

- Putting fuels on the national agenda.

- Serving customer needs.

- Landscape and regional scale efforts (Columbia Basin) and integrated assessments are occurring.

- Packaging research, development, and application.

- Land managers are using research information.

- Collaborating at local levels.

- Gaining political support and understanding.

- Missed opportunities to provide fire research leadership on emerging natural resource issues.

- Connection between similar work is limited.

- Organized around functions not goals.

- Risk aversion makes it difficult to adapt to changing conditions and situations.

- Lack of fiscal accountability.

- Do not mobilize for opportunities as well as we do for threats.

- Do not commit resources based on long-term net benefits as is done for short-term risks.

- Opportunities missed to contribute to rehabilitation and restoration.

- A crisis is required to spur action.

- Research is not meeting management needs.

- Not insisting on thorough fire investigations.

- Lack of accountability.

- Lack of integrated research and integrated planning.

- Not supporting visionaries, risk takers, and the Federal Wildland Fire Policy.

- Not burning enough acres/hectares.

- Not enough objective monitoring.

- Building a business process that combines management, science, and social aspects.

- Effort of multiple disciplines to integrate fire into land management.

- Progress in software integration.

- Moving from macroscale support to mesoscale support.

- Quality educational programs to increase stakeholder knowledge.

- Bringing tools to the field for application, training, and collaboration.

- Fire is not fully integrated in the land management process.

- Doing things for the wrong reason; activity accomplishment is money driven.

- Prescribed fire operations are commonly discounted as a part-time job that occurs between the primary jobs (suppression).

- Using yesterday's technology on today's issues.

- Unable to move faster to upgrade technologies.

- Some want to do business the way we used to.

- Management decisions are made without adequately understanding the ecological consequences.

- Decisions are often based on product attractiveness rather than on a sound scientific foundation.

- Working in a cross-disciplinary manner in fire research.

- Initiating steps to help understand fire-line dynamics.

- Developing a significant quantity and quality of models and products.

- Supporting remote sensing with physical science.

- Recognizing where technology stops and social science begins.

- Canadian Forest Service has met the current need of fire and land managers.

- Attracting external cooperators to research problems.

- Unable to understand research complexities fast enough.

- Have not communicated model limitations to nonmodelers.

- Model use is limited.

- Not expressing concerns to land management agencies.

- Distracted by administrative policy and technological "red herring."

- Canadian Forest Service delayed necessary groundwork for long-term work.

- Inability to effectively and efficiently get products from research to users.

- Informative demonstration projects.

- Successful new treatments.

- Increased communication between researchers and managers is fostering a climate of cooperation and collaboration.

- Complex and integrative projects, long-term planning models, and multiple temporal/spatial data.

- Implementing management programs based on research.

- National key message about fire.

- Increased use of natural history experiments and long-term studies.

- Increased interagency and multiagency collaboration effort.

- Integrated resource and fire management objectives.

- Educating public, peers, managers.

- Improved understanding of fire and climate relations.

- Leadership in fire and watershed effects and in engaging USGS scientists.

- Successful international and interagency cooperation on fire and fuels management.

- Research results are influencing management.

- Ignoring hydrologic impacts of fire.

- Hazard reduction is rationale for prescribed fire.

- Inadequate communication between researchers and land managers.

- Money being unnecessarily spent on fire suppression.

- Conducting expensive, unnecessary rehabilitation operations.

- Limited spatial- and temporal-scale work.

- Single discipline approach continues to be the norm.

- Lost public trust.

- Lack of consideration about political and social events related to fire.

- The five national key messages about fire are not widely known.

- The overhead proportion of funding is increasing.

- A small percentage of agency budget is obligated to research.

- Rewards for innovation are few.

- Not using field offices to help identify research needs.

- Successfully linking fire, climate, and social values.

- Joint problem solving between the EPA and other agencies related to the Clean Air Act and visibility standards.

- High level of professionalism.

- Interagency cooperation on a local scale.

- Bureaucratic inertia/provincialism.

- Weak link with social science.

- Government mistrust.

- Disconnected between reality and public opinion; chaotic science.

- Lack of long-term focus on priorities.

- Less willing to take risks associated with fire.

- Lack of focus and agency expertise in monitoring.

- Human factors are being promoted (ad-hoc work).

- Variety of demonstrations exist.

- Helping agency people work with media.

- Improving our professional communication.

- Accomplishing much with little.

- Value of and what social science can offer is being recognized.

- Included as stakeholders in this conference.

- Lack of public understanding.

- Promoting safety has negative consequences.

- Firefighter safety is a third or fourth priority.

- Funding is being channeled away from human dimensions.

- No mechanism exists to relay research funding to the ground.

- Inadequate social science data.

- Ineffective identification work.

- Not managing across boundaries.

- Limited understanding of other disciplines.

- No unified statement on the role of social scientists.

- Constrained time.