ArcFuels User Guide and Tutorial: for use with ArcGIS 9

Abstract

Fuel management planning can be a complex problem that is assisted by fire behavior modeling and geospatial analyses. Fuel management often is a particularly complicated process in which the benefits and potential impacts of fuel treatments need to be demonstrated in the context of land management goals and public expectations. Fire intensity, likelihood, and effects can be analyzed for multiple treatment alternatives. Depending on the goal, the effect of treatments on wildfire impacts can be considered at multiple scales, from a single forest stand or planning unit to a watershed to a national forest to the Nation as a whole. The fuel treatment planning process is complicated by the lack of data assimilation among fire behavior models and by weak linkages to geographic information systems, corporate data, and desktop office software. ArcFuels is a streamlined fuel management planning and wildfire risk assessment system. ArcFuels creates a trans-scale (stand to large landscape) interface to apply various forest growth and fire behavior models within an ArcGIS® platform to design and test fuel treatment alternatives. It eliminates a number of tedious data transformations and repetitive processes that have plagued the fire operations and research communities as they apply the models to solve fuel management problems. This User Guide and Tutorial includes an overview of ArcFuels and its functionality, a tutorial highlighting all the tools within ArcFuels, and fuel treatment planning scenarios. There is also a section for obtaining, formatting, and setting up ArcFuels for use with your own data. It is assumed that the reader has basic familiarity with the Forest Vegetation Simulator (forest growth and yield program) and FlamMap (landscape fire behavior model).

Citation

Vaillant, Nicole M.; Ager, Alan A.; Anderson, John; Miller, Lauren. 2013. ArcFuels User Guide and Tutorial: for use with ArcGIS 9. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-877. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 256 p.