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May 2019: Remap, Fuels, BpS, Interview, YouTube
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Here's looking at you, kid.
LF REMAP FOR THE SOUTHWEST
AND "YEAR CAPABLE" FUELS
Southwest: The second release of LF Remap products is scheduled for early summer. This release adds Disturbance, Vegetation, and Fuel for the Southwest GeoArea to the LF Remap suite of products (see map above). As with the first release (Northwest GeoArea), these products represent circa 2016 ground conditions and were designed to produce vegetation and fuels data that inform wildland fire and natural resource management decisions. Be sure to check the LF website for release news.

"Year Capable" fuels: In addition, refinements have been made to LF Remap fuel products. A varied approach was adopted to more accurately represent vegetation within disturbed areas for fuels use, allowing LF Remap fuels to represent "year capable" products. This means that the Time Since Disturbance (TSD) assignments for disturbed areas have been calculated using an effective year. In previous versions of LF, users had to manipulate LF fuels to represent current conditions for disturbed areas. By synchronizing TSD for both canopy and surface fuels, this new process considers all the existing disturbances included in LF Remap and assigns the TSD based upon the current year making it "year capable," or in the current instance “2019 capable.” As a result, starting with the Southwest GeoArea release (which includes the Northwest GeoArea fuel products), LF Remap fuels data in areas mapped as disturbed within the past 10 years (disturbances since 2009) will be delivered with a TSD factor that better represents current conditions.

LF Remap fuels data in pixels that have not been mapped as disturbed in the previous 10-year period use LF Remap existing vegetation (c2016), the newest fuel vegetation information available. Disturbances older than 10 years follow the existing LF protocol for removal from Fuel Disturbance and are mapped using LF Remap existing vegetation. Note: Disturbances for 2017 through 2018 are not yet available.

The objective of this refinement is to improve, clarify, and simplify fuel transitions and regrowth following disturbances. By synchronizing TSDs for surface and canopy fuels, these refinements improve performance of fire behavior modeling and reduce the need for local LF users to update the vegetation and fuel conditions to represent current conditions.

Note: webinars examining LF Remap in the Southwest are scheduled for fall. Co-hosts include the Southwest, Great Basin, and Southern Rockies Fire Science Consortia, and the SCGIS/Conservation Biology Institute. More are in the planning stages.

 
BpS MODELS HELP PUT CURRENT FIRE TRENDS  IN PERSPECTIVE
A recent article in Ecosphere, The Missing Fire: Quantifying human exclusion of wildfire in Pacific Northwest forests, USA, demonstrates how LF reference condition models can provide context for answering current land management questions. In this article, Ryan Haugo and his co-authors tackle the question: has wildfire extent and severity changed over time in Pacific Northwest forests?

LF Biophysical Settings (BpS) models provided the foundation for quantifying historical fire regimes in thi study. The BpS models were modified to capture variation in fire frequency and severity and to make the outputs comparable to the contemporary wildfire data. Contemporary fire regimes were quantified using Modeling Trends in Burn Severity data. 

The results of the analysis indicate that fires today are less extensive than they were historically, and current fire severities do not align with historical fire regimes particularly in drier forests throughout the region where there is a deficit of low-severity fire. The authors conclude that careful attention should be paid to fire severities when fire is used as a restoration tool in northwest forests. -- Kori Blankenship
VALUE AND POWER OF COLLABORATION:
Q & A WITH COLIN DANIEL, APEX RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Colin Daniel is a Systems Ecologist and President of Apex Resource Management Solutions (ApexRMS), a Canadian firm that specializes in developing ecological forecasts for government, industry and non-governmental organizations across North America. Colin holds a Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (University of Toronto), an M.Sc. in Zoology (University of British Columbia), and a B.A.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering (University of Waterloo).
As an ecological consultant for more than 25 years, much of Colin’s work has focused on the development of tools and techniques to project landscape change, including projections of both vegetation and land use/land cover; major clients include the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Forest Service, and The Nature Conservancy. Since founding ApexRMS in 2007 Colin has overseen the development of the company’s free ST-Sim software platform for developing spatially-explicit state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) of landscape change.

Read our interview to find out why Colin says that the development and success of ST-Sim demonstrates the value and power of collaborations between government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector. "Without that coordination, the ST-Sim and SyncroSim products would simply not exist today."

VEGETATION CONDITION CLASS AND VEGETATION DEPARTURE ...

… CAN BE APPLIED TO LAND MANAGMENT PLANNING. Fire Regime Vegetation Condition Class is a two-factor index intended to indicate how “different” current vegetation structure/composition AND current fire regime are from baseline (historic in our case) vegetation structure/composition AND baseline fire regime. In early LF versions we delivered a product called "Fire Regime Condition Class" (FRCC), but it was misnamed because we did not include the fire regime departure portion of the index in the calculation. As a result we changed the name of the product from FRCC to Vegetation Departure (VDEP), which more accurately reflects what we included.
That being said, it is important to know that the details of the vegetation departure calculation have varied over time as we tried to make it more useful. Those details are critical to understanding this metric and using it or not using it appropriately. More about VDEP.
 

JAMES L. SMITH MEDAL AWARDED

The International Spatial Accuracy Research Association (ISARA) recently announced that it presented the 2018 James L. Smith Young Scientist Award to Dr. Zhao Xi, from the Chinese Antarctic Center of Surveying and Mapping, Wuhan University, China. Dr. Xi is a specialist on uncertainty and accuracy in spatial information. Jim is The Nature Conservancy's LANDFIRE Program Lead.
 
What: In 1992, motivated by the dismal state of data quality in natural resources databases, Jim, then of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, envisioned a conference to address spatial accuracy that would have special reference to natural resources and GIS. This thinking turned into action and the convening of the first symposium in 1992, which he chaired.
 
In 2013, for his initial vision and dedicated work to launch the International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences series, ISARA established a medal that acknowledges Jim’s contribution to initiating an open, considerate, and honest evaluation of the topic. The award, presented every four years, recognizes an early career scientist working in the areas of measuring, modeling, and managing uncertainty or error in spatial natural resources or environmental data.

In February 2019, LF announced the release of the first of 10 Remap data products, in what will be a national rollout between 2019-2021. With the Northwest Fire Science Consortium, LF hosted a webinar that examined improvements to  previous product offerings, reviewed what remains the same, and explained how LF resources can address specific fire and land management issues. The webinar was recorded and is posted on LF's YouTube Channel.
The LANDFIRE Program is a cooperative agreement between the USDA Forest Service, agencies of the Department of the Interior, and The Nature Conservancy. In accordance with Federal law and U.S. Department of Agriculture policy, the Program is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.

Henry Bastian
DOI Business Lead
Frank Fay
USFS Business Lead

Jim Smith
TNC-LF Project Lead

Birgit Peterson
USGS Technical Lead

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LANDFIRE Postcards | Jeannie Patton | LANDFIRE@tnc.org