My Fuel Treatment Planner (MyFTP)

Description

My Fuel Treatment Planner (MyFTP) is designed to allow planners working at the level of a national forest district or similarly sized unit to estimate costs, revenues, economic impacts, and surface fuels resulting from operations designed to reduce fuel loads in fire-prone forests. The software is limited in scope to the dry forests of the western United States. MyFTP is a spreadsheet application developed with Microsoft® Excel® 2002. Its compatibility with spreadsheet software other than Microsoft Excel has not been tested. MyFTP has, however, been tested successfully with Excel 2002-2003 and with Excel 2007.

Use

What the Model Does

MyFTP provides an estimate of costs, revenues, economic impacts, and surface fuels associated with fuel reduction treatments that involve the potential for product utilization. It helps you to answer questions such as: “I have a lot of stands that look like this, I wonder what it would cost to treat them?” or “I wonder what types of stand treatments could pay for themselves on my district?” or “Can I combine mechanical treatments and prescribed fire to make treatments less expensive?” It provides for comparison of alternative treatments and alternative treatment areas. It also provides a limited ability to look at scenarios combined into projects.

What the Model Does Not Do

Although MyFTP allows for comparison of alternatives and some coimaging of scenarios, it is not intended to provide a site-specific appraisal for a project. MyFTP was designed to address treatment costs, potential for offsetting costs with product utilization, the effect of treatment on surface fuel loads, and the economic impact at the time of fuel treatment. Longer term economic impacts could occur if fuel treatment affects other forest uses such as recreation. Current research on the effect of thining and prescribed fire treatments on recreation and other forest uses is too limited to provide the basis for modeling these effects.

Required Inputs

The most important inputs are data on the trees to be cut (species, diameter, height if available, and number per acre), and which trees are to be chipped or cut into logs. Other inputs include State and County, pretreatment surface fuel load, harvesting system, size of harvest unit, slope, yarding distance, hauling distance, and prices for chips and logs. Additional inputs are required if cost estimates for mastication or prescribed fire are needed. Agency administration hours and cost per hour and the uses to which utilized logs would go are required if economic impacts of treatments are needed. Economic impacts are things such as the number of jobs and income generated in the economic area.

MyFTP INSTALLER—The link below leads to a Microsoft Installer (.msi) file that will install all of the Excel files plus several auxiliary files that are required for MyFTP to operate correctly.

Installation instructions—please read this PDF document first! You may find it helpful to print this file so that you can refer to it as you are installing MyFTP and when you run it the first time or two.

Please note: The installation module requires the Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0 or a later version to be available on your computer system. If the MyFTP installation fails, it may be because your computer has an older version of the Microsoft Installer. In that case you can download the most recent version of the installer from the appropriate Microsoft web page as indicated below. Follow the instructions on the download page to install the module. Because the installer is a component of the Windows operating system you must have administrative privileges to install it.

Release Notes

System and Software Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Windows 7
• Microsoft Excel 2002, 2003, or 2007

Partners: Rocky Mountain Research Station; Northern Research Station ; Pacific Southwest Research Station