National fire policy and direction mandates that federal agencies focus on the protection of life, property, and resources with a risk-based and shared-stewardship approach while leveraging new technologies and working with state and federal agencies and partners. An emerging concept is strategic wildland fire management planning, which focuses on pre-season, fire season, and post-season planning to help fire and land managers identify appropriate, effective, and safer strategies for responding to wildfires. Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) are an integral part of this concept. PODs are operationally relevant fire management areas bounded by potential control features, such as rivers, roads, ridgelines, barren areas, fuel treatments, and previous fires. PODs are developed by local fire, fuel, and resource specialists based on their knowledge of historical fire movement and containment, land and/or resource management plan direction, and highly valued resources and assets. These polygons, and line features that may bound the polygons, are often used by incident management team’s operation and planning sections. A standard is needed to establish expectations for PODs development and to ensure consistency in data use, clarify ambiguous meanings, minimize redundant data, and document business rules for users. The standard will be periodically revisited as PODs are more broadly applied on the landscape and used in spatial fire planning.

This geospatial layer depicts areas of wildland fire potential operational delineations defined by potential control features.