The accumulation of canopy and surface fuels, coupled with a general warming of the climate, have contributed to an increase in the frequency, severity, and size of wildfires in the western United States.

Contemporary wildfires and their control have become a contentious issue in the US because of their high cost, capability to damage property and hurt people, and potential to cause ecological harm. On the other hand, these same wildfires can also reduce fuels, restore fire to fire-adapted ecosystems, and increase ecosystem health. Unfortunately, government agencies in charge of suppressing wildfires have few tools available to evaluate whether a wildfire is causing ecological harm or providing benefits to the landscapes in which it burns. If the wildfire poses no threat to humans and is actually improving ecosystem integrity, then why not let it burn? The challenge is to develop a real-time, operational tool that fire managers could use to quickly evaluate if the wildfire is actually improving ecosystem health and landscape condition. The problem with most current tools is they tend to be somewhat subjective and too complex which makes them difficult to employ in real-time, operational wildfire efforts. Data used to evaluate values at risk, especially GIS layers, can be incomplete, incompatible, and inconsistent. This project is developing a process implemented into a software application that can be used to provide wildfire suppression teams an objective evaluation of the ability of a wildfire to improve or degrade landscape and ecosystem health. This computer program, called FLEAT (Fire and Landscape Ecology Assessment Tool), merges currently available fire behavior, fire effects, and landscape simulation models together into a platform that objectively evaluates the degree to which a wildfire is moving the landscape toward or away from a simulated range of historical conditions. This estimate is synthesized into a simple index that can provide wildfire managers valuable information to determine how aggressive to fight a wildfire and where to put fire fighting resources. While this tool does not directly assess all potential values at risk during a wildfire (e.g., power lines, water supply watersheds), it provides a generalized and simplistic index that can be used in conjunction with other analyses, such as RAVAR (Rapid Assessment of Values At Risk), to manage wildfires and wildland fire use fires

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Robert Keane, Deputy Program Manager, Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Science (FFS); Research Ecologist; Director, Fire Modeling Institute (FMI)

Staff

Eva Karau, Stacy Drury, Jhen Rawling, Violet Holley, Signe Leirfallom

Collaborators

David Calkin, RMRS; Kevin Hyde, Contractor with RMRS

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The project has one primary objective: to create a platform that can be used for real-time wildfire management that objectively evaluates the effect of the wildfire on the landscape in which it is burning based on the historical range and variability of the landscape composition of that same landscape. The audience for this effort is managers and researchers interested in a tool for evaluating benefits of wildland fires, both wildfires and wildland fire use. This research may lead to new methods of balancing the cost of fighting wildfires with the ecological benefits that they provide.

METHODS AND RESULTS

FLEAT is a C++ program that integrates several existing software packages to compute an index that describes if a wildfire is improving or degrading the landscape. FLEAT is more of a software platform than a simulation model because it fuses previously developed fire and landscape simulation models into a cohesive application and does not contain any new simulation methods. FLEAT was designed to be used as an operational tool to generate information for managing wildfires in real-time, event situations; the program will run overnight and generate simple, easy to understand output. Currently, FLEAT is a research tool that requires highly trained spatial analysts for use, but it is designed to be eventually merged into a more friendly, simple, and efficient interface for input and output data management. The FLEAT program performs the following six major steps (Figure 1) to compute an index that informs the fire manager of the benefits or drawbacks of a wildfire:

• Download spatial data. The program uses standardized spatial data as inputs to the various models incorporated in its design.
• Estimate fire severity. The platform uses remotely sensed maps of fire severity or it computes fire severity from fire behavior and effects models.
• Predict future landscape composition. FLEAT will simulate vegetation development and predict what the landscape looks like, both inside and outside the burn, for 1, 10, and 100 years post-wildfire.
• Simulate HRV. FLEAT uses a landscape fire succession model to simulate the range and variation of historical landscape composition.
• Compute similarity. An estimate of similarity is calculated by comparing HRV time series with the pre-fire and 1, 10, 100 year post-fire landscape compositions.
• Output general index. A general index of departure is output and displayed in a simple graphic summary.

There are many possible applications of the process of evaluating benefits and risk using the FLEAT program. Because FLEAT can be run overnight, fire managers can use the FLEAT output product in real-time wildfire decision support. In fire planning, FLEAT can be used to prioritize landscapes for fuel treatments by executing the program for a set of fire weather scenarios to evaluate if subsequent fires can move the landscape towards or away from historical conditions. FLEAT can also be used to generate fire severity maps in real time or planning time frames so that other resource characteristics can be evaluated, such as watershed erosion. Last, FLEAT output could be used in fire management planning to identify those portions of the landscape where active suppression is indicated and those portions where wildland fire use is more effective.

REFERENCES

Keane, Robert E. and Karau, Eva. 2010. Evaluating wildfire benefits by integrating fire and ecosystem models. Ecological Modelling 221:1162-1172

PROJECT STATUS

This is a 4 year study with model building and testing, results validation, and model refinement taking place from 2007 to 2011.

FUNDING ORGANIZATIONS

This work is currently being funded by USDA Forest Service Washington Office of Fire and Aviation Management and the RMRS Fire Research and Development Project.