Project Title: Developing a tool to determine wildfire’s ecological benefits
Abstract: Suppression is the over arching goal for most wildfires but some wildfires can actually be consistent with management goals by resulting in ecological benefits. Most fire fighting organizations do not have the tools and data to decide if the fire is actually doing ecological good. We have proposed a project that would create a computer program that interfaces with the LANDFIRE spatial data that presents with wildfire suppression team a simple graphic that illustrates the ecological benefits of letting the fire burn. This program, called CID (Change In Departure), firsts predicts burn severity then simulates vegetation development for one, ten, and a hundred years after the wildfire using this severity. CID then simulates landscape dynamics for 5,000 years using historical fire regime information to determine the historical variability of landscape composition (HRV). Next, the program computes the departure of four landscapes from the simulated HRV using a similarity statistic. These four landscapes include: 1) pre-wildfire, 2) predicted 1 year after the wildfire, 3) predicted 10 years after the wildfire, and 4) predicted 100 years after the wildfire. The difference in departure from the pre-wildfire condition to the three post-wildfire conditions forms an index that is used to rate the benefit of the wildfire. Positive differences indicate increased benefit because departure from HRV decreases. This analysis is done for the area that burned in the wildfire, the area that is predicted to burn, and the context landscape as a whole.
Agency Contacts: Bob Keane and Stacy Drury, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station
Funding Source: Fire RDA
Expected delivery date: Sept. 30, 2008
