Megan Sebasky
At the Minnesota Incident Command System meeting this week, I learned about an amazing online tool that is available to work with and edit LANDFIRE data, create landscape (.LCP) files, run fire behavior models (only FlamMap basic for now, more soon), create reports, develop treatment alternatives, and in the near future: run risk assessment analysis, prioritize treatments, evaluate treatment, etc. etc. It's called the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS), here: https://iftdss.firenet.gov/landing_page/. There's still a lot to come but what is available now is already pretty powerful. Here are some highlights:
- Use the Map Studio to bring in a wide array of reference datasets to overlay and determine your landscape area. The team is looking for suggestions on reference datasets to add, so please let them know if there is a dataset you'd like to see.
- Create a landscape (.LCP) file based on LANDFIRE data with just a few clicks.
- Use the Landscape Editor to edit fuel rulesets. This is very similar to the LANDFIRE Total Fuels Change Tool (LF TFC) but the ruleset lookup tables have been simplified. More on that here: https://iftdss.firenet.gov/firenetHelp/help/pageHelp/content/30-tasks/lndscpedit/landscapeeditabout.htm?cshid=1083
- This tool will save all of the added and modified fuel rules, and with a few clicks you can create a report that includes a map of the landscape, bar charts with the distribution of fuel models by area, the rule sets used, etc.
- In the next few months, the Risk Assessment capability will be enabled. This will run a Quantitative Risk Assessment based on the GTR-315 Wildfire Risk Assessment Framework for Land and Resource Management (https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=798847).
- In the future, this site will pull burn data from IRWIN and other fire reporting systems every night so you have the most up-to-date information.
There are several helpful videos to learn about this site. My favorite is the Planning Cycle Introduction, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wvAEvquMvU.
The team creating this site is looking for feedback as they want to make it useful for people at all types of agencies with various needs. They are even looking for places to use as case studies, so contact them or let me know if you'd like to try it for your landscape!
Once I set up a login, I spent a few minutes creating a new landscape for testing and generated the default report. See attached. This took less than 5 minutes to set up, and the report took about 5 minutes to run. When you create a report, you can download the full report (attached) or download charts individually.
