Project: Operationalizing the LANDFIRE Projected Fuel and Vegetation Change framework
Client: The Nature Conservancy, LANDFIRE
Year: 2022 - Present
Focus Area: Landscape Change (Vegetation, land use, and land cover change)
Client: The Nature Conservancy, LANDFIRE
Year: 2022 - Present
Focus Area: Landscape Change (Vegetation, land use, and land cover change)
Project Overview
Accurate and up-to-date information on vegetation and fuels are critical for effective fire and natural resource management across the United States. LANDFIRE vegetation and fuel maps provide spatially explicit, nationally consistent information about vegetation structure, composition, and fuel characteristics. These products are regularly updated to reflect natural and anthropogenic changes in land cover, supporting a wide range of applications – from prescribed fire and suppression planning to ecosystem restoration – and enabling land managers and policymakers to make informed and timely decisions. However, the update process relies on subject matter expertise and is not standardized across the entire country, making this process time-consuming and not fully open to peer review.
In response to these limitations, we developed a new framework – the Projected Fuel and Vegetation Change (PFVC) – to enhance the LANDFIRE update process. By operationalizing the PFVC process within SyncroSim, we can build a more transparent, flexible, and scalable system for modelling vegetation and fuel change under current and future scenarios.
In the first stage of this project, we analyzed input data from various sources to estimate the rates of change in existing vegetation, and derive rules needed for modeling growth, disturbance effects, and transitions in lifeform and vegetation type. This step is intended to be repeated periodically, incorporating changes observed with satellite imagery and direct field observations.
In the second stage, we developed a suite of SyncroSim packages that provide a user-friendly interface for inputting and reviewing growth and disturbance effect data, as well as lifeform and existing vegetation transition data, and prepare the required inputs for running updates and forecasts using ST-Sim. After these analyses have been run, ST-Sim is run to simulate changes in lifeform, vegetation cover and vegetation height. Outputs from ST-Sim are used to forecast changes in vegetation type and fuels.
The current stage of the project will focus on refining the vegetation modelling rules for certain vegetation types and evaluating the performance of the forecast-based approach against imagery-based updates. We will also incorporate these findings into the documentation and deploy the associated SyncroSim packages for wider testing and usage.
Photo credit: Stephen Leonardi
Figure 1. Screenshot of a ST-Sim library in SyncroSim Cloud showing forecasted changes in vegetation cover based on the results from the PFVC framework.
Project:
Operationalizing the LANDFIRE Projected Fuel and Vegetation Change framework
Client: The Nature Conservancy, LANDFIRE
Year: 2022 - Present
Focus Area: Landscape Change (Vegetation, land use, and land cover change)
Project Overview
Accurate and up-to-date information on vegetation and fuels are critical for effective fire and natural resource management across the United States. LANDFIRE vegetation and fuel maps provide spatially explicit, nationally consistent information about vegetation structure, composition, and fuel characteristics. These products are regularly updated to reflect natural and anthropogenic changes in land cover, supporting a wide range of applications – from prescribed fire and suppression planning to ecosystem restoration – and enabling land managers and policymakers to make informed and timely decisions. However, the update process relies on subject matter expertise and is not standardized across the entire country, making this process time-consuming and not fully open to peer review.
In response to these limitations, we developed a new framework – the Projected Fuel and Vegetation Change (PFVC) – to enhance the LANDFIRE update process. By operationalizing the PFVC process within SyncroSim, we can build a more transparent, flexible, and scalable system for modelling vegetation and fuel change under current and future scenarios.
In the first stage of this project, we analyzed input data from various sources to estimate the rates of change in existing vegetation, and derive rules needed for modeling growth, disturbance effects, and transitions in lifeform and vegetation type. This step is intended to be repeated periodically, incorporating changes observed with satellite imagery and direct field observations.
In the second stage, we developed a suite of SyncroSim packages that provide a user-friendly interface for inputting and reviewing growth and disturbance effect data, as well as lifeform and existing vegetation transition data, and prepare the required inputs for running updates and forecasts using ST-Sim. After these analyses have been run, ST-Sim is run to simulate changes in lifeform, vegetation cover and vegetation height. Outputs from ST-Sim are used to forecast changes in vegetation type and fuels.
The current stage of the project will focus on refining the vegetation modelling rules for certain vegetation types and evaluating the performance of the forecast-based approach against imagery-based updates. We will also incorporate these findings into the documentation and deploy the associated SyncroSim packages for wider testing and usage.
Figure 1. Screenshot of a ST-Sim library in SyncroSim Cloud showing forecasted changes in vegetation cover based on the results from the PFVC framework.