Simulation and Cost-Guided Fuel Treatment Planning for Prescribed-Fire Containment

Prescribed fires can reduce hazardous fuel loads, but planning remains challenging in landscapes with complex terrain, mixed vegetation, and nearby infrastructure. Predicting and controlling where a prescribed fire may breach its containment lines can be carried out by integrating fire-behavior simulations with practical treatment planning. This paper presents a two-stage framework using QUIC-Fire to identify high-risk escape zones and allocate containment treatments under cost and resource constraints. Stage 1 identifies high-risk boundary segments and assigns adjacent zones to fuel removal or moisture treatment to limit simulated fire spread beyond the control line. Stage 2 refines these assignments by incorporating treatment costs and penalty values near infrastructure to evaluate resource-constrained alternatives. Applied to a 14.2-ha prescribed-fire unit in Mount Laguna, California, the optimized Stage 2 configuration maintained containment under the simulated conditions while reducing total implementation cost from USD 97,319 to USD 95,266 (approximately 2.1%) and reducing fire-engine demand from six to three. These results illustrate how cost-aware treatment reallocation can improve resource efficiency for prescribed-fire performance.