Planning for resilience: modeling change in human–fire interactions in the Alaskan boreal forest

The development of policies that promote ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability requires collaboration between natural and social scientists. We present a modeling approach to facilitate this communication and illustrate its application to studies of wildfire in the interior of Alaska. We distill the essence of complex fire–vegetation interactions that occur in the real world into a simplified landscape model, and describe how equally complex fire–human interactions could be incorporated into a similar modeling framework. Simulations suggest that fire suppression is likely to increase the proportion of flammable vegetation on the landscape and reduce the long-term effectiveness of wildfire suppression. Simple models that test the consequences of assumptions help natural and social scientists to communicate objectively when exploring the long-term consequences of alternative policy scenarios.