Participatory multi-criteria decision analysis to prioritize management areas that help suppress wildfires

Sergio Rodríguez-Fernández^1*Philip J Murphy²Keith Morgan Reynolds³Srijana Poudel¹Jose G Borges¹José Ramón González-Olabarria⁴

• ¹Universidade de Lisboa Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Lisbon, Portugal
• ²Info Harvest, Inc., Seattle, United States
• ³USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Portland, United States
• ⁴Centre de Ciencia i Tecnologia Forestal de Catalunya, Solsona, Spain

Effective wildfire prevention and suppression demand targeted fuel management strategies, particularly in fire-prone regions. This study develops a spatial decision-support framework that integrates stakeholder preferences into wildfire prevention planning through a participatory Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approach. The methodology was applied in Vale do Sousa, a high-risk region in northern Portugal, where a combination of expert knowledge and stakeholder input was used to prioritize fuel treatment areas. The Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system was employed to run the decision model across 2,429 afforested management units. Stakeholder performance in pairwise comparisons was assessed using three complementary measures: Consistency Ratio (CR), Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (S), and Euclidean Distance (ED). These indicators were used to assign weights to participants, acknowledging variation in the quality and alignment of individual inputs. CR was used once per participant to assess judgment coherence, while S and ED measures were applied across multiple decision phases to capture alignment with the group. The final weights were derived from the average of the three indicators, ensuring a balanced incorporation of participant input. The results of the prioritization showed that 1.2% of the study area was classified as 'very high' priority for fuel management, and an additional 7.9% as 'high' priority, highlighting areas where resources should be concentrated to maximize impact. This approach enhances the transparency and robustness of participatory planning and supports the spatial prioritization of areas where to allocate fuel treatment resources to enhance wildfire suppression efforts at the landscape scale.