Treesearch

The Southern Blue Ridge Fire Learning Network (SBR FLN) is a cooperative program between the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior agencies, and The Nature Conservancy. Its goal is to restore forests and grasslands and to make (human) communities safer from fire. Since 2007, the SBR FLN has engaged Federal, State, and private partners to integrate science and local knowledge. Eight landscape teams focus on restoring pine and pine oak forests, primarily through prescribed burning. Common vegetation maps/models are used to identify areas most in need of restoration, and to develop a...

The Joint Fire Science Program’s Knowledge Exchange Consortia Network is actively working to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science information by Federal, tribal, State, local and private stakeholders within ecologically similar regions. Our network of 14 regional consortia provides timely, accurate, and regionally relevant science-based information to assist with fire management challenges. Regional activities, through which we engage fire managers, scientists, and private landowners, include online newsletters and announcements, social media,...

Natural resource managers have long desired to obtain user friendly, management directed answers from research results. Through partnerships with researchers, cooperative projects, and management hosted endeavors, mutually beneficial outcomes have been accomplished that provide quantifiable data and applicable direction for both research and management professionals. Often times, projects conducted by managers are further facilitated by having research associated elements, which provide support and justification through science-based monitoring and assessment to evaluate outcomes and...

SILVAH is a systematic approach to silvicultural prescription development based on inventory and analysis of stand data for Allegheny hardwood, northern hardwood, and mixed oak forests. SILVAH includes annual training sessions and decision support software, and it ensures a consistent, complete, and objective approach to prescriptions. SILVAH has created a community of practice with common vocabulary and framework for assessing forest stands. Lessons learned from thirty years of research-manager cooperation may be relevant to the work of the Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers and...

The last decade saw a dramatic proliferation of software systems intended to help fire and fuels managers in the United States. Funding for these software systems came from a variety of sources without any central control or vision. A governance process with stated requirements on how to transition a research-grade software application to an operationally ready one was never created. This resulted in a fuels management environment with numerous, fragmented, stand-alone tools; system and data access issues; decentralized planning and support; minimal security; and ad-hoc training

The George Washington and Jefferson National Forests (GWJNF) in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy began planning a monitoring program utilizing adaptive management methods to guide prescribed burning in 2008. The development of a successful monitoring program requires extensive research, planning, and cooperation between fire management officers and ecologists to establish measurable burn objectives. Working together, the GWJNF and The Nature Conservancy developed monitoring protocols then utilized the database Feat and Firemon Integrated (FFI), free software developed by the...

Prescribed fire is used widely to mitigate wildfires and restore ecosystems. However, there are few tools developed to evaluate fire’s cumulative impact, calculate frequency, examine seasonality, and estimate fuel accumulation to facilitate decisionmaking in targeting successive prescribed fire application. An ESRI shapefile of all wildfire and prescribed fire events was assimilated from 1978 to 2012 for the 235,000-acre Talladega Division in east central Alabama. A python script-based tool was developed for ArcGIS10 to calculate the annualized average fire return interval, years of fuel...

The effort to utilize satellite-based MODIS, AVHRR, and GOES fire detections from the Hazard Monitoring System (HMS) to identify undocumented fires in Florida and improve the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) mapping process has yielded promising results. This method was augmented using regression tree models to identify burned/not-burned pixels (BnB) in every Landsat scene (1984–2012) in Worldwide Referencing System 2 Path/Rows 16/40, 17/39, and 1839. The burned area delineations were combined with the HMS detections to create burned area polygons attributed with their date of...

The use of prescribed fire has increased dramatically over the last 15 years in the Appalachian Mountains; managers are interested in tracking the effects of their fire programs. Since the mid-1990s, Southern Region National forests have been required to collect data on fuels and vegetation in permanent plots. However, lack of personnel dedicated to this effort has limited the number of plots each forest is capable of maintaining. Thus, National forests are encouraged to work across boundaries and share information with neighboring districts, National forests, and agencies with similar...

Much of the language used by the wildland fire community and news media has implicit anti-fire bias that perpetuates anti-fire attitudes. In order to promote greater fire use for ecological fire management, new words need to be created; existing words should be redefined; and new identities for fire management workers must be developed. FUSEE presents some examples of the new words, symbols, and slogans it uses in its public education and policy advocacy work to nurture pro-fire attitudes and help support a paradigm shift in fire management. This paper argues that other agencies, organizati...