The wildFire-Aquatic Vulnerability Assessment (FAVA), a spatially explicit, hierarchical composite index that integrates three dimensions, wildfire potential, watershed sensitivity, and biological resilience, to characterize the relative vulnerability of aquatic species to wildfire across the Pacific Northwest. We applied FAVA to bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus), a threatened cold-water salmonid. This dataset contains metrics (described in detail below) used to calculate the biological resilience, watershed sensitivity, and wildfire exposure potential, and overall vulnerability score (FAVA) within 118 known bull trout habitats (core areas; USFWS, 2024) in the Columbia and Klamath River basins bull trout core areas in the Columbia and Klamath River Basins in the Pacific Northwest, USA.

Instead of assigning definitive weights to the FAVA index, we conducted a global sensitivity analysis using Latin Hypercube Sampling to evaluate the sensitivity of the index to random, variable weighting schemes. Indicator weights within each dimension and weights across the three dimensions were sampled from uniform distributions and normalized to sum to one within each hierarchical level. A total of 500 simulations were generated and the composite index was recalculated for each simulation. For each core area, the mean and standard deviation (SD) of FAVA across simulations were calculated as measures of expected vulnerability and sensitivity to weighting scenarios, expressed as uncertainty.