5th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology and the 2nd International Wildland Fire Ecology and Fire Management Congress

Wednesday, 19 November 2003: 11:30 AM
Potential Management Applications of the LANDFIRE Products
Donald Long, USDA Forest Service, Missoula, MT; and M. Rollins and W. Hann
LANDFIRE’s objectives are to provide broad scale, comprehensive information about the distribution of fuel characteristics and fire regimes across the United States based on the best available geographic and wildland fire science. This information will be fine-grained enough for local wildland fire managers to evaluate and prioritize fuel treatment projects within their administrative units. The comprehensive and consistent methods of LANDFIRE allow prioritization of potential treatment areas with equivalent databases across the entire United States. As LANDFIRE updates become available, the efficacy of fuel treatments may be monitored. LANDFIRE deliverables should be viewed as a ‘safety net’ for areas that lack geospatial data for implementing the National Fire Plan. Local high resolution data may already exist for certain areas. In this case, the LANDFIRE system will include tools to ensure that local fire and fuel information may be substituted for the LANDFIRE layers if these data exist and are perceived as having more utility than the LANDFIRE products. The LANDFIRE field reference database will be similarly dynamic, with tools for immediately incorporating recently collected plot based information on fuels and fire regimes for local LANDFIRE updates. This presentation focuses on two case studies represented by relatively large landscapes (20,000-50,000 acres)in Montana and Utah. For each landscape, Fire Regime Condition Classes were calculated using LANDFIRE data products and models. Then, LANDFIRE models were integrated with locally available data for each landscape to improve on LANDFIRE’s maps of fuel characteristics and fire regimes and Fire Regime Condition Classes were then “recalculated” using these data. The effects of each effort on prioritization of fuel treatments are then compared in order to illustrate the differences between the two approaches.

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