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Fire Effects Information System (FEIS)

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FEIS facilitates use of our research legacy as a basis for sound management.

The Fire Effects Information System is an online collection of reviews of the scientific literature about fire effects on plants and animals and about fire regimes of plant communities in the United States. FEIS reviews are based on thorough literature searches, often supplemented with insights from field scientists and managers. FEIS provides reviews that are efficient to use, thoroughly documented, and defensible. Approximately 15 to 30 new or revised reviews are published in FEIS each year.

Species Reviews include information on plant, lichen, and wildlife species’ life history, ecology, and relationship to fire. They are available for more than 1,200 species occurring throughout the United States.

Fire Studies are summaries of one or more fire research projects at a specific location. Fire Studies cover research that provides detailed descriptions of site characteristics, burning conditions, fire behavior, and fire effects. FEIS contains more than 150 Fire Studies, which complement Species Reviews and Fire Regime Syntheses and provide information on hundreds of species for which Species Reviews are not available.

New in 2013, Fire Regime Syntheses provide up-to-date information on fire regimes of ecosystems in the United States. The syntheses provide information from the literature and from LANDFIRE data on historical fire frequency, spatial pattern, extent, and seasonality; historical ignition sources; typical patterns of fire intensity and severity; and contemporary changes in fuels and fire regimes.

The Fire Effects Library houses the literature that supports FEIS reviews. The library contains more than 60,000 references on fire effects and the general biology and ecology of organisms in North America. References are catalogued in an online database, the Citation Retrieval System (CRS). Users are encouraged to use CRS to supplement information from FEIS reviews.

Managers from federal land management agencies recommend the topics to be covered in FEIS.

Modified: Nov 10, 2015

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Visit the Fire Effects Information System for more than 1,000 reviews of scientific information on fire ecology, fire effects, and fire regimes.

Visit the Citation Retrieval System to search more than 60,000 references on fire ecology, fire effects, fire history, and the biology or organisms in North America.