Rapid Assessment Fire Regime Groups March 2008 CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW

LANDFIRE Rapid Assessment data for the lower 48 states are now available at the LANDFIRE products site and through the US Geological Survey at http://gisdata.usgs.net/website/landfire/ The Rapid Assessment (RA) was conceived as a way of providing an interim map of fire regime conditions at moderate accuracy for the conterminous U.S. until the second phase of LANDFIRE is completed. The RA data will be replaced continually by LANDFIRE National data as they are completed between now and 2009. The LANDFIRE National data will be developed using field information and more refined methods, and will have a broader suite of products than the RA.

Within the Conservancy, RA data can be used for ecoregional and regional 3-year implementation planning for the 2015 goal, and will be used to track progress toward the 2015 goal in the lower 48 in the U.S. until more refined LANDFIRE data is available. These data may also inform conservation actions at state or multi-state scales.

Reference condition models for the RA were created in 2004-2005 through a series of TNC-led expert workshops and a peer-review process. RA data, designed to be applied at the scale of approximately 1:1 million or greater, are considerably more refined than the coarse scale data set released several years ago (Schmidt et al. 2002), and are the first moderate resolution, consistent, “coast to coast ” data related to fire and fuels ever compiled for the lower 48 states.

Accessing Data

Users may go to the LANDFIRE website “Products” link and download the data for specific areas. You may also go directly to the USGS site at http://gisdata.usgs.net/website/landfire/.  If you experience problems downloading data from the website, please contact helpdesk@landfire.gov.  Click here to see a sample map of FRCC data.

The Nature Conservancy’s Role

The primary role of The Nature Conservancy in the LANDFIRE project as a whole is to complete quantitative succession models (VDDT models) for all major potential natural vegetation types across the conterminous U.S. for the RA, and for all major biophysical settings (related to NatureServe Ecological Systems) across the entire U.S. for the national implementation of LANDFIRE. Models are being developed by groups of experts in structured, facilitated workshops.

The Conservancy is implementing nine Application Projects to demonstrate the utility of RA and LANDFIRE National data for landscape-level collaboration, fuels treatment and fire regime restoration, and to identify differences between local information and LANDFIRE data.

The National Interagency Fire Technology Team (NIFTT) offers three-day training workshops on how to use the data for fire planning. The TNC-LANDFIRE team has tentative plans to offer WebEx training to assist users with obtaining and processing data, and to explore data characteristics and applications. Please contact Jim Smith at jim_smith@tnc.org if you are interested in attending one of these WebEx sessions.

This page was last checked 12 June 2008.