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

Wednesday, 19 November 2003: 8:30 AM
Developing the spatial programs and models needed for implementation of the LANDFIRE Project
Robert E. Keane, USDA Forest Service, Missoula, MT; and M. Rollins and R. Parsons
Poster PDF (225.6 kB)
The LANDFIRE (LANDscape and FIRE Management Planning System, www.landfire.gov) project was initiated to provide scientifically credible, comprehensive and critical mid-scale data for prioritization and planning to implement the National Fire Plan, both at the national and local level. The objective of LANDFIRE is to provide the spatial data and predictive models needed by land and fire managers to prioritize, evaluate, plan, complete, and monitor fuel treatment and restoration projects, essential to achieving the goals targeted in the Cohesive Strategy and National Fire Plan of the United States. Critical for the completion of LANDFIRE objectives is the development of a set of spatial analysis tools for the mapping and modeling of variables important to fire management. The first set of programs are used in the mapping of vegetation, fuels, and biophysical settings and they include: DAYMET (a 1 km resolution spatial database for 18 years of daily weather), WXFIRE (a weather program that extrapolates and summarizes DAYMET weather to finer resolutions), LF-BGC (a biogeochemical model that simulates the flow or carbon, water, and nitrogen from DAYMET weather). The next set of programs are used in the calculation of fire regime condition class (FRCC) which is an index that compares historical conditions with current conditions: LANDSUMv4 (a landscape fire succession model for simulating fire and vegetation interactions spatially) and HRVSTAT (a statistical program that analyzes simulated historical conditions and compares with current conditions to compute the FRCC index). The last set of tools are used to compute fire hazard over time and space: FIREHARM (a program that computes the probability of a fire event occurring over the DAYMET weather record), an updated set of fire behavior fuel models, and a new set of fire effects fuel models. Each of these tools will be available for use by fire managers everywhere. This talk will discuss each tool and its integration into the LANDFIRE process.

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