Fireline Effectiveness (FLE) Dashboard

Photo Credit

Graphic by the Wildfire Risk Management Science Team of the USDA Forest Service

The Fireline Effectiveness Dashboard allows users to view perimeters of wildfires (blue) and information about individual firelines (red).

Wildland fire response is resource-intensive, high-risk, and increasingly complex. On a fireline, fire responders actively work to contain wildfire spread. To improve outcomes, fire managers need a better understanding of what has worked — and why. The Wildfire Risk Management Science (WRMS) team at the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station helps meet this need by analyzing where firelines successfully held, burned over, or were not engaged across hundreds of large wildfires. 

The Fireline Effectiveness (FLE) Dashboard allows users to explore the locations of reported fireline and their associated engagement outcomes—categorized as held, burned over, or not engaged—across all wildfires larger than 1,000 acres with reported perimeters and fireline data from National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) Open Data. In addition to spatial fireline data, users can interactively view performance metrics that summarize suppression effectiveness for each incident. To explore wildfires smaller than 1,000 acres, use this toolkit.

To produce the Fireline Effectiveness Dashboard, researchers first developed a model to clean, validate, and classify fireline engagement outcomes that draw from national fireline data managed by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). They developed fireline effectiveness metrics to assess and compare fireline effectiveness across incidents and regions. This enables standardized evaluation of suppression performance within and across wildfire incidents.

Purpose

To analyze firelines on past wildfires to understand what worked and why. A better understanding of how past wildfire incidents unfolded can help managers make more informed decisions when suppressing wildfires.

Application and Overview