The Rocky Mountain Research Station has recently released an article discussing one of their new models: FORSYS. Those involved describe this model and the reasons for its development:
US public land management agencies are faced with multiple and often conflicting objectives to meet management targets and produce a wide range of ecosystem services expected from public lands. To understand how these conflicts play out on large fire frequent landscapes we built a spatial scenario planning model (FORSYS) and used to in several case studies to examine how different management priorities translate into landscape change. The model was designed to explore landscape management scenarios and optimize decisions in terms of where and how to achieve different outcomes and outputs at different scales. We are studying these management tradeoffs by simulating a wide range of management scenarios where activities are prioritized according to multiple agency land assessments on wildfire risk, economic opportunity, and ecological conditions.