Assessments

Southern Appalachian Assessment used a LF EVT dataset to develop a "Forests Vitality Index" that supports forest management and reclamation activities, including watershed and water quality protection, soil erosion control, continuous yield of forest products, and multiple wildlife and recreational benefits. -- Jim

The Illinois Fire Council developed the state's fire needs assessment to promote and expand the use of prescribed fire. This is the first systematic report in Illinois to document the number of acres burned annually and identify how many need to burn in order to promote ecosystem health. It provides a call to action for land managers, legislators and the general public. Products used: BpS, EVT, and MFRI were foundational resources. -- Sarah

To quantify and identify priority areas for prescribed fire, the Wisconsin Fire Needs Assessment combines the information for fire dependent vegetation with additional spatial data sets to assess the benefits, effort, and challenges associated with using prescribed fire. LF data were used because they include both public and private lands; they are publicly available, making the methods easy to replicate for other states; and the assessment can be updated with future versions of LF data. Vegetation descriptions that included historical mean fire return intervals were an important part of the analysis. -- Sarah

Land Management

Prioritizing what to do where and when is a major challenge for land managers. The Nature Conservancy and Hiawatha National Forest are working to identify opportunities to both restore fire-dependent ecosystems and reduce wildfire risk in and around the Wildland Urban Interface. To do this assessment the team is using existing data from the Hiawatha and locally reviewed and adjusted LF BpS, S-Class and Fire Regime Condition Class datasets. -- Randy

In most of the western US, large fires are becoming more frequent, and fire size and percentage of high-severity fire is increasing. Prior to late 2015, no published studies directly compared fire statistics among federal land management agencies in the Sierra Nevada, Southern Cascades, and Modoc Plateau. In Differences in wildfires among ecoregions and land management agencies in the Sierra Nevada region, California, Brandon Collins compares fire stats for wildfires among ecoregions, forest types, and land management agencies 1984–2009. Link to video webinar. -- Jeannie

The 1990 National Indian Forest Resources Management Act established the only third-party review of federal forest management practices in the US on a ten-year basis. The emergence of LF in 2009 offered the opportunity to include a consistent and systematic view of forest condition for the third assessment in 2013 by the Indian Forest Management Assessment Team (IFMAT-III). Reports and associated materials are available on the Intertribal Timber Council website.  LF Vegetation Condition Class data were used to examine relative proportions of VCC1-3 lands by region and were combined with other data to examine forest condition trends. -- Henry

To best support tactical and strategic wildland fire management decisions, Birgit Peterson and others are developing a tool to incorporate Lidar 3D canopy structure data and LF data. The tool, Creating Hybrid Structure from LF/Lidar Combinations (CHISLIC), provides users the capability of generating a suite of improved vegetation structure and wildland fuel parameters. -- Julia

Data Applications/Modifications

LF data can be updated and modified to improve fire behavior, consumption and emissions estimates. In the short report Updating LANDFIRE Fuel Grids Using MTBS Fire Severity Data, Beauchaine and Blankenship document the process they used for updating LANDFIRE’s 2012 Fire Behavior Fuel Model 40 and associated spatial data layers to a reflect changes on the landscape resulting from four large fires in 2013 within the South Central Idaho Fire Planning Unit. -- Kori

In A Case Study Comparison of LANDFIRE Fuel Loading and Emissions Generation on a Mixed Conifer Forest in Northern Idaho, USA, Josh Hyde and others compare LF’s Fuels Characteristics Classification System and Fuel Loading Model spatial data layers to measured fuel loadings. The results indicate that there were differences between the mapped and measured fuel loadings and that these  differences translated into significantly different modeled rates of fuel consumption and emissions. -- Kori

Kurtis Nelson, Don Long, and Joel Connot discuss the LF 2010 data release and the consistency of the enhanced vegetation, fuel, and fire regime layers across the United States in the newly published LANDFIRE 2010—Updates to the national dataset to support improved fire and natural resource management open file report. Using landscape conditions from approximately 2010, the enhancements to the data products include refinement of urban areas and agricultural lands, and improved wetlands delineations.and fuel parameters. -- Julia