Research Article

Evaluating Sensitivity of the Ranking of Forest Fuel Treatments to Manager’s Risk Attitudes and the Importance of Treatment Objectives, Montana, USA

Table 1

Derivation of baseline weights for attributes of FTSs for Forest Service (FS), Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DR), and Plum Creek Timber Company (PC).

AttributRating scores for attributeWeight
FSDRPCFSDRPC

ERLW53.42.3.2
EDRV434.33.3.4
ENR344.25.4.4

a. ERLW is expected residential monetary losses from wildfire, EDRV is expected deviation of forest ecological conditions from their historic range and variability, and ENRH is expected net returns from timber harvesting associated with fuel treatment.
b. Very low = 1, low = 2, moderate = 3, high = 4, and very high = 5.
c. Weights for each agency obtained by dividing each attribute score by the sum of the scores.
d. Because PC managers did not indicate the importance of ERLW, a weight of .2 (low importance) was assigned to ERLW for PC land.
e. Based on rating assigned to importance of commercial timber losses from survey of three forest landowners.