NWETC Training: ArcGIS Interface for Fuel Treatment Planning & Wildfire Risk Assessment

The Northwest Environmental Training Center, an EOS Alliance program, is offering this 3 day course to provide applied GIS training to wildfire planning and management. This course will focus on software training using ArcFuels. ArcFuels is a suite of custom ArcGIS tools developed to streamline fire behavior modeling and spatial analyses for fuel treatment planning. Attendees will preview the entire ArcFuels toolset, and students will learn how to use ArcFuels tools to prepare data for loading into other wildfire behavior models (E.g. FlamMap, FARSITE). By the end of the training, you will learn how to link ArcFuels to FlamMap and then we will use FlamMap to model a few landscape scale fire behavior scenarios.

After completing this course, participants will be able to:

• Fully integrate the custom ArcGIS toolset ArcFuels into their wildfire planning and management Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
• Prepare data in ArcFuels to be used in FlamMap.
• Begin using FlamMap for landscape scale wildfire behavior modeling.
• Possess a more streamlined approach for wildfire risk planning, fuel treatment planning, and spatial analysis of wildfire in the ArcGIS environment.

Here’s an overview of ArcFuels: Arc Fuels is a library of ArcGIS macros developed to streamline fire behavior modeling and spatial analysis for fuel treatment planning. The macros link: 1)key wildfire behavior models; 2)fuels and vegetation data (e.g. landfire, FVS databses); 3) MS Offices; and 4) ArcGIS (WWETAC 2009). Arc Fuels is designed with linkages to FlameMap to allow for simulation of landscape-scale fire behavior and evaluation of fuel treatment scenarios.

Specific Functions Include:

• An interactive linkage between digital imagery, vegetation data, FVS-FFE, and SVS, providing a map-based tool for designing, simulating, and visualizing stand fuel treatments
• Rapid scale-up of stand-specific treatments to simulate landscape packages of treatment alternatives,
• Data linkages between FVS outputs and FlamMap to allow for simulation of landscape-scale fire behavior and evaluation of fuel treatment scenarios,
• Full GIS functionality provided within ArcMap for data manipulation, ancillary analyses, mapping, and other GIS functionality (WWETAC 2009).

The course is being offered at The Evergreen State College, in the Library Building – Computer Center, 2700 Evergreen Parkway NW, Olympia.