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. In addition to meeting the primary objective of providing the information necessary to support an assessment of recent trends in fire severity, a valuable data legacy will be available to support a broad range of research and operational uses at multiple scales. High-resolution fire severity data generated at the individual fire scale, yet assembled at broad geographic extents, offers the potential to support analysis ranging in scope from event specific to continental. Future applications will explore the utility of these data to support threat assessments across a wide range of ecological systems and provide a spatial and temporal framework to better understand the immediate and longer term inter-relationships of wildland disturbance agents and risk factors in postfire settings.