Establishing a Nationwide Baseline of Historical Burn Severity Data to Support Monitoring of Trends in Wildfire Effects and National Fire Policies
There is a need to provide agency leaders, elected officials, and the general public with summary information regarding the effects of large wildfires. Recently, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC), which implements and coordinates National Fire Plan (NFP) and Federal Wildland Fire Management Policies (National Fire Plan 2004), adopted a strategy to monitor the effectiveness and effects of the National Fire Plan and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA 2003). One component of this strategy is to assess the environmental impacts of large wildland fires and identify the trends of burn severity on all lands across the United States (WFLC 2004 Monitoring Proposal, Module 2.1).
To that end, WFLC has sponsored a 6- year project, Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), which requires the USFS and the USGS to map and assess the burn severity for all large current and historical fires. Using Landsat data and the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) algorithm, the USGS/EROS Data Center and USDA-FS/ Remote Sensing Applications Center will map burn severity of all fires occurring from 1984 to 2010. Only fires that are greater than 500 acres in the East, and 1000 acres in the West will be included. We anticipate mapping a total of more than 9000 historical fires and fires that occur during the course of the study.
The MTBS project will generate burn severity data, maps, and reports, which will be available for use at local, State, and national levels to evaluate trends in burn severity and help develop and assess the effectiveness of land management decisions. Additionally, the information developed will provide a baseline from which to monitor the recovery and health of fire-affected landscapes over time. Spatial and tabular data quantifying burn severity will augment existing information used to estimate risk associated with a range of current and future resource threats. For example, fire severity data along with associated biophysical characteristics provide an analytical basis for assessing risk from invasive species as well as native insects and pathogens. All data and results will be distributed to the public via a Web interface.
- Introduction : Consistent geospatial information characterizing effects of large wildland fires does not exist for lands within the United States.
- Methods : Methods selection for this project was fundamentally driven by two requirements: (1) The need to develop consistent information across all lands within the project extent, and (2) the need to develop consistent information spanning a significant historical period.
- Applications for Fire Severity Data : Central to the missions of both the Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center and the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center is the early detection, identification, and assessment of multiple environmental threats such as insects, disease, invasive species, fire, loss or degradation of forests, and weather-related risks.
- Conclusions : The MTBS project will develop the data and information necessary to meet the strategic analysis objectives of WFLC and other policy-making and monitoring bodies.
Encyclopedia ID: p3598
