|
|
 |
Pre-European Fire Regime Groups
|
LANDFIRE is an innovative wildland fire, ecosystem, and fuel assessment-mapping project designed to generate consistent, comprehensive, landscape-scale maps of vegetation, fire, and fuel characteristics for the United States using a consistent process nation-wide. It responds to agency and partner needs for data to support biodiversity conservation, fire management planning, prioritization of fuel treatments, collaboration, community and firefighter protection and effective resource allocation. For more information, please visit the official LANDFIRE web site.
LANDFIRE spatial products and vegetation models can
- Provide consistent landscape-scale, cross-boundary geospatial products to support fire and land management planning activities.
- Help identify and assess conservation targets, and evaluate individual or multiple threats to conservation targets.
- Help explore the potential effectiveness and costs of various management options.
- Help strengthen partner relationships through collaborative learning.
- Help stewards and planners learn about past, present and potential future disturbance regimes and effects.
- Supplement or assist local planning and management and monitoring activities requiring consistent vegetation data.
- Assist with strategic and tactical planning for fire operations where other necessary data is unavailable.
- Help federal and state agencies and private organizations collaborate with regard to fire and other natural resource management.
- Help agencies and partner organizations perform regional modeling of potential fire behavior and fire effects to strategically plan projects for hazardous fuel reduction and restoration of ecosystem integrity on fire-adapted landscapes.
- Assist with Community Wildfire Protection Plans, effective resource allocation, and collaboration between agencies and the public.
There are several versions of LANDFIRE spatial products available for download, and more will be coming. The current product versions represent different time periods or improvement processes, and at least one is available for only a portion of the country. LANDFIRE is actively working on some systematic data improvements, which will be available for downloading soon. In addition, the LANDFIRE Refresh program will update all circa 2000 current vegetation layers and related products to 2008 using remote sensing techniques, models and field-supplied information.
More Than Fire
Though named LANDFIRE, the suite of tools, models and digital map layers is the first complete, nationally consistent collection of resources with an ecological foundation that can be used across several disciplines. As such, LANDFIRE reaches beyond research and results regarding fire in the United States.
Under the original project contract, TNC’s team created 20+ digital map layers, including current vegetation, estimated pre-European settlement vegetation, current vegetation structure, and a metric that summarizes how current vegetation composition and structure are different from pre-settlement vegetation. In addition to these spatial products, the team coordinated the development of more than 1,000 dynamic, quantitative models of vegetation succession and disturbance, which mathematically and textually describe all major U.S. Ecological Systems.
All of these products are available for public download at www.landfire.gov. See also the Application Projects, Stories from the Field, and Resources/Links sections on this site. LANDFIRE models and spatial layers have been used in important wildland fire management situations, but also in numerous and varied conservation applications as well, such as an “enhanced CAP process,” national condition assessments and habitat evaluations.
Original products were developed for national or regional analyses, but may be useful for smaller geographies after review and possible adjustment by local experts. Currently, the LANDFIRE Program is improving and updating products, and working to increase their appropriate use.
TNC-LANDFIRE is part of the North America Conservation Region at The Nature Conservancy.
Contact us.
Page last updated 1 Sept 2010.
|
