Protecting Forest Land Using GIS:

The Coeur d'Alene Tribe Natural Resources – GIS Program is implementing a project to monitor fire fuels on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation and in Benewah County. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow us to create maps to display information in a visual manner. This visual representation is easier to read and use than a table showing the same information numerically. GIS can be used to create maps using spatial data, or data that answers the questions what, where, when and how many.

We can use the information gathered to produce a fire behavior monitoring program like FARSITE or Fire Area Simulator, which is used by the United States Department of the Interior (USDI) National Park Service and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service to produce fire growth models based on topography, fuels, and weather and wind files. The GIS layer produced by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe Natural Resources - GIS Program will be dealing primarily with forest fuels information in order to better manage forest and timber areas that may be at risk of wildfire due to over-growth of shrubs and other low growing plants. Information gathered this summer will be used by Natural Resources fire managers to develop a fire program environmental analysis that will be used for the next ten years.

FIREMON is a fire monitoring program developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), USDA Forest Service, Systems for Environmental Management (SEM), and the Joint Fire Science Program. The program was developed to assist fire managers to start programs for what has historically been a low priority area, monitoring the effects of fire on areas that have been burned in the past and are likely to burn again in the future unless certain protocols are put into effect. This could mean using controlled burns or clearing of underbrush to prevent catastrophic fires from destroying timber and damaging ecosystems. According to the overview found at http://fire.org/firemon, monitoring the effects of wild land fire is critical for (1) documenting fire effects, (2) assessing ecosystem damage and benefit, (3) evaluating the success or failure of a burn, and (4) appraising the potential for future treatments.

The Coeur d'Alene Tribe is using FIREMON as part of the Coeur d'Alene Reservation Wildland Fire Hazard Identification Plan. Continual Forest Inventory (CFI) data and existing GIS data will be used as baseline information on specific plot areas. Teams will be going out and sampling the fuels load in these plots using several different protocols. Plot descriptions will provide information on stand heights, elevation, aspect, and slope of the plot. Tree data gives us an idea of the density, size and age classes of trees on the plots. Fuels load is probably the most important protocol in this sampling scheme. For this protocol, several transects are laid down within a plot and the load of downed woody debris, duff, and litter, such as pine needles, dead leaves and grass, are counted along the transects.

Other protocols that could be used to measure or predict fire behavior are species composition; cover frequency (canopy cover), density of vegetation, and rare species information. Landscape assessment includes composite burn index and normalized burn ratio. Predicting fire behavior based on these protocols will increase the chances that fires can be caught before burning out of control.

The end result of this program, other than an ongoing fuels load count taken every year, is the accumulation of data that can be put into a remote sensing model to exhibit vegetation reflectance and vegetation growth over a specific period of time. The GIS layer produced will include new color imagery and will be ground-truthed to identify condition classes. This GIS layer will provide a tool for fire managers to manage forest and timber areas to minimize fire damage.

For summer 2004 there are two teams of two individuals who will be taking transects on plots located primarily on tribally owned land. Each plot will take approximately one half hour to forty-five minutes to complete. There are 466 CFI plots located within the Reservation boundary. This project will take most of the summer and is seen as ongoing primarily within the boundaries of the Coeur d'Alene Reservation and Benewah County.