Fire and Environmental Research Applications Team

Quantifying Carbon Emissions from Wildfire for North America

FERA scientists are co-investigators in a collaborative project linking remote sensing and ground-based products to estimate carbon emissions from wildfires across North America with a web-based decision support system (DSS)

FERA’s involvement has been to:

1. Develop Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) fuelbeds for the conterminous United States (CONUS) and Alaska
2. Upgrade the existing fuelbed map for the CONUS, and build one for Alaska
3. Provide a geospatial data layer of fuel loadings for use in the DSS that will enable users to calculate carbon emissions from fires anywhere in North America.

Maps

We completed fuels maps for the conterminous United States and Alaska, and have linked Consume 3.0 into the DSS for consumption and emissions calculations. The Canadian Forest Service will supply fuels data for their landscapes, as will the Mexican Forest Service, guided by FERA’s Ernesto Alvarado. Together this will provide a wall-to-wall coverage of FCCS fuelbeds across North America.  

Vegetation-Fuelbed Crosswalks

The key to fuelbed mapping across the United States was a crosswalk between LANDFIRE’s existing vegetation types (EVTs), which are based on the NatureServe classification, and FCCS fuelbeds. Development of the crosswalk was led by FERA team member Anne Andreu, who identified canonical vegetation characteristics of the EVTs and their correspondence to existing FCCS fuelbeds. Where no good correspondence was found, Andreu created new fuelbeds (97 total for the CONUS and Alaska).

Western Contermious United States (116 kb)

Eastern Conterminous United States (34 kb)

Alaska (25 kb)

Publications

McKenzie, Donald; French, Nancy H.F.; Ottmar, Roger D. 2012. National database for calculating fuel available to wildfires. Eos. 93(6): 57-58.

Project Leads: Roger Ottmar and Don McKenzie

Collaborators: Our co-principal investigator is Dr. Nancy French of the Michigan Tech Research Institute, Michigan Technological University. Collaborators include Dr. Eric Kasischke (University of Maryland), and William de Groot, Canadian Forest Service.

FERA Research Team Members Involved in This Research

Don McKenzie (spatial analysis and mapping)
Roger Ottmar (fuel characterization)
Ernesto Alvarado (fire & fuels in Mexico)
Maureen Kennedy (vegetation modeling)
Kjell Swedin (computing)
Rob Norheim (GIS analysis)
Anne Andreu (fuelbeds in the eastern U.S. and Alaska)
Jorge Castro (fuelbeds in Mexico)

This research is funded by National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA)