Current fire behavior and decision support systems such as Wildand Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) and Rapid Assessment of Values at risk (RAVAR) require up-to-date spatial data depicting the amount and condition of fuels across the landscape. With so many lives, properties and resources at risk Updated, timely and accurate estimates of non-forest fuels is a critical component of fire management today. Wildland fuels in arid regions of the U.S. respond quickly to inter-annual variations in vegetation productivity, especially when annual invasive species such as cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) and red brome (Bromus rubens) are present. Currently no system exists which seamlessly and comprehensively provides updated data for all non-forest fuels. Therefore, an annual monitoring and updating strategy is needed that will deliver spatially explicit depictions of surface fuels in a continuous and comprehensive manner. In response to this need we developed a satellite based fuel updating protocol for estimating surface Fire Behavior Fuel Models for U.S. rangelands. The major components of the system are described. Implementation of this protocol resulted in four unique geospatial datasets for the coterminous U.S.: Annual 1-hr fuel amount (lbs ac-1), Annual fine fuel deviation expressed as a percent of the 12 year average, Comparison and difference between current year's fine fuel estimate and the fine fuel (1-hr time lag) suggested by the Landfire surface fire behavior fuel model (expressed as a percent), Annually updated surface fire behavior fuel models for the Scott and Burgan (2005) fuel models from 2000 to 2012 at 30 meter spatial resolution.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.