Fire and Environmental Research Applications Team

Quantifying Carbon Emissions from Wildfire for North America

FERA scientists are co-investigators in a project linking remote sensing and ground-based products to estimate carbon emissions from wildfires across North America. FERA’s involvement is to develop Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) fuelbeds for Mexico and Alaska, to complement the existing fuelbed classification and map for the conterminous United States, and to provide a geospatial data layer of fuel loadings for use in a web-based decision-support system (DSS) that will allow users to calculate carbon emissions from fires anywhere in North America. The Canadian Forest Service will supply fuels data for their landscapes, and together we will provide a wall-to-wall coverage of FCCS fuelbeds across North America. We will produce a fuels map for North America, and a geospatial database that links NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data layers with the FCCS map to more precisely quantify fuels in forest and shrub canopies and live fuels in grasslands. We are also linking Consume 3.0 into the DSS.

Link to MichiganTech Research Institute Overview Page

Request GIS Fuelbed Files

Completion of Fuelbed GIS Layer: December 2010

FERA Research Team:

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

Progress

January 2010 -- Featured in the article "Quantifying wildfire emissions across North America with the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System" in the Canadian Smoke Newsletter Fall 2009 Issue

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.

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