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A major goal of the North American Carbon Program is to resolve uncertainties in understanding and managing the carbon cycle of North America. As carbon modeling tools become more comprehensive, accurate datasets to spatially quantify carbon emissions from fire are needed. Dr. Nancy French, of the Michigan Technological University, Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) has teamed with specialists at the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Center's Fire and Environmental Research Applications (FERA) lab to provide information for mapping fire-derived carbon emissions by adapting existing Forest Service fire information products and tools using NASA data and products. This work extends previous research of Dr. French's reviewed at: http://fireconsumption.mtri.org/.

The Goal of the proposed project is: To develop improved products for modeling and estimating fire emissions across North America and a prototype information system for disseminating this information to users who manage carbon or model the carbon cycle.

Estimating fire emissions from ground-based data requires calculation from four parameters (Figure 1; French et al. 2004): area burned, fuel loading (biomass per unit area), fuel consumption (fraction of biomass consumed), and emission factors (mass of a given chemical species emitted per mass of fuel/biomass consumed). The project planned will collect data for all of these factors so information users will have the latest and most accurate data for use in models and emissions estimations.

The information will be provided at a 1 km spatial resolution and have relevance for understanding fire-affected carbon cycling at regional scales for the North American continent. Products and results will be consistent across international borders, although product reliability will inevitably vary due to availability of field and remote sensing data needed to create and validate the products.

Objective 1: Development and Deployment of the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System

MTRI is in the process of developing an on-line geospatial information system, called the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS), that pulls together fire perimeter maps along with corresponding fuel consumption and fuel loading data layers for fuel emission modeling.  The geospatial data system will be built from open-source software components that work with open international standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) such as Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) in order to facilitate future enhancements to the system.

Click here for more on the WFEIS (available Nov 2009)

Once the prototype system is developed to a point where the information products are available and the system is functional, the system will be tested internally to troubleshoot apparent problems.  The final step of the proposed project will be to make modifications to the prototype information system structure, function, and data content based on feedback from the user advisory group.  Once the system is satisfactorily functional, system documentation will be finalized as a project deliverable.  The system will be hosted by MTRI as developed under the project funding for an indefinite time.  Web site enhancements and addition of improved products beyond the lifetime of the proposed project will be arranged near the end of the project with NASA or other interested parties and will continue as funding is available.

Objective 2: Developing Carbon Emission Information Products

The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) will provide access to data representing all four of the data layers needed for estimating fire emissions (see Figure 1). Information products will be provided as GIS-based and tabular products at a 1-km cell-size covering North America, including Alaska, Canada, the conterminous United States, and Mexico.  The proposed project will provide the most up-to-date versions of the four data layers in the proposed information system. Each layer will require a different level of integration into the planned system. Of the four data layers needed for emissions mapping, two will be improved as described in the full proposal by FERA and MTRI.  The fuel loading maps will be extended to all of North America based on the procedure employed to map the conterminous US by Co-I McKenzie with some additional improvements using additional spatial data and MODIS products.  A set of fuel consumption scenarios will be produced by employing the CONSUME 3.0 fuel consumption model augmented with data collected on boreal fuels and consumption provided by collaborators Kasischke and de Groot.  Improvement of these two products will be the main outputs from this part of the proposed project.

Area Burned:  Mapping areas burned in wildland fire is done using both satellite-based mapping methods and more conventional methods, such as aerial reconnaissance. Some regions maintain a comprehensive, geospatial database of fire perimeters, including Alaska and Canada, while the Continental US and Mexico have not compiled fire perimeter data as effectively.  For the WFEIS we will provide fire perimeter data from several sources, including, MODIS-derived burn area (Gilio et al. 2009), fire perimeters mapped from Landsat satellite images under the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program (MTBS web site), and historic fire datasets, including the Alaska Large Fire Database (Kasischke et al. 2002)  and the Canadian Large Fire database (Stocks et al. 2002).

Fuel Loading: The amount of fuel, also referred to as biomass, determines the potential amount of carbon emissions.  The Fuel Characteristics Classification System (FCCS) fuelbed descriptions are the basis for defining and mapping fuel load for the US and Mexico within the WFEIS (McKenzie et al. 2007; Ottmar et al. 2007; FCCS web page ).  For Canada, fuels are defined using the Canadian Fire Behavior Prediction system fuels.

Fuel Consumption and Emission Facors: The portion of fuel that burns during a fire is controlled by many factors, including the fuel type, vegetation structure, and fuel moisture.  The CONSUME fuel consumption and fire emissions model is the basis for determining fuel consumption within the WFEIS for the US and Mexico (CONSUME web page).  The Canadian model CanFIRE is used to compute consumption and emissions for Canada (de Groot et al. 2007).  Emission Factors are used to divide estimates of total emissions based on the amount of fuel consumed into specific smoke constituents.  CONSUME and CanFIRE provide emissions of total particulate matter (PM), PM10, PM2.5, carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) (EmissionFactors.pdf).

REFERENCES

Burn area data sets:

Kasischke, E.S., D. Williams, and D. Barry. 2002. Analysis of the patterns of large fires in the boreal forest region of Alaska. Int. J. Wildland Fire 11:131-144.

Stocks, B.J., J.A. Mason, J.B. Todd, E.M. Bosch, B.M. Wotton, B.D. Amiro, M.D. Flannigan, K.G. Hirsch, K.A. Logan, D.L. Martell, and W.R. Skinner. 2002. Large Forest Fires in Canada, 1959-1997. J. Geophys. Res. 107:8149. doi:10.1029/2001JD000484.

Giglio, L., T. Loboda, D.P. Roy, B. Quayle, and C.O. Justice. 2009. An Active-Fire Based Burned Area Mapping Algorithm for the MODIS Sensor. Rem. Sens. Environ. 113:408-420.

Fuel load & mapping data:

McKenzie D, Raymond CL, Kellogg L-KB, Norheim RA, Andreu AG, Bayard AC, Kopper KE, Elman E. 2007 Mapping fuels at multiple scales: landscape application of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 37, 2421-2437.

Ottmar, R.D., Sandberg, D.V., Riccardi, C.L., Prichard, S. J. 2007. An overview of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) - quantifying, classifying, and creating fuelbeds for resource planning. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 37:1-11. 

Fuel Consumption and Emissions Factors data/tools:

de Groot, W.J., R. Landry, W.A. Kurz, K.R. Anderson, P. Englefield, R.H. Fraser, R.J. Hall, E. Banfield, D.A. Raymond, V. Decker, T.J. Lynham, and J.M. Pritchard. 2007. Estimating direct carbon emissions from Canadian wildland fires. Int. J. Wildland Fire 16:593-606.