Socioeconomic impacts of the NASA RECOVER decision support system for wildfire emergency response planning

Rehabilitation Capability Convergence for Ecosystem Recovery (RECOVER) postfire decision support system is a server-based application designed to rapidly provide land managers with the information needed to develop a comprehensive rehabilitation plan. This study evaluated the efficacy of RECOVER through structured interviews with land managers (n = 20) who used RECOVER and were responsible for postfire rehabilitation efforts on over 715,000 ha of fire-affected lands. Although the benefit of better-informed decisions is difficult to quantify, the results of this study illustrate that RECOVER’s decision support capabilities provided information to land managers that either validated or altered their decisions on postfire treatments. Savings from streamlining data collection were estimated at over US $1.2 million and nearly 800 hours of staff time, and communication within an agency and with local stakeholders and partnering agencies was improved.