A Fuelscape for All Land Ownerships in the Eastern Region
The Eastern Region of the USDA Forest Service contracted with Pyrologix to complete an assessment of wildfire hazard across all land ownerships in the northeastern states. The foundation of any wildfire hazard or risk assessment is a current-condition fuelscape, updated for recent disturbances and calibrated to reflect the fire behavior potential observed in recent historical wildfire events. We leveraged LANDFIRE 2016 Remap 2.0.0 (LF Remap) data to generate a calibrated fuelscape for use in this region-wide assessment.
LF Remap was released in the spring of 2019 with significant improvements over previous versions of LANDFIRE, including the use of new satellite imagery and continuous vegetation cover and height classifications(1) .Though LF Remap was available for some parts of the country at the outset of the Eastern Region Wildfire Risk Assessment (ERRA) project, the geographic areas needed to cover the entire Eastern Region were not fully available until July of 2020. For this reason, fuel calibration was initially undertaken on the 2014 LANDFIRE data products. Later, when LF Remap became available, the fuel calibration was applied to the LF Remap products to provide a fuelscape based on the best-available LANDFIRE data.
