Fire
Management Program Center Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity: NPS Providing
Leadership and Support for Interagency Burn Severity
Mapping
Recently the Wildland Fire Leadership Council
(WFLC) adopted a strategy to monitor the effectiveness of
the National Fire Plan (NFP) and the Healthy Forests Restoration
Act (HFRA). One component of this strategy is to assess the
environmental impacts of large wildland fires and identify
the trends in burn severity across the United States.
Over the past several years, United States
Geological Survey – Earth Resources Observation &
Science (USGS/EROS), United States Geological Survey –
Biological Resources Division (USGS/BRD) and the National
Park Service (NPS) have cooperated to produce and deliver
burn severity mapping products for national parks and other
land management agencies. Because of the strength of this
working relationship, these groups took on the leadership
role to develop Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS)
with USDA Forest Service - Remote Sensing Applications Center
(USFS RSAC) to support the WFLC monitoring strategy.
This project will map and assess burn severity
for all historical and current large fires using Landsat satellite
imagery and the differenced Normalize Burn Ratio algorithm.
EROS and RSAC will assess burn severity for all fires greater
than 500 acres in the eastern United States, and greater than
1000 acres in the West that have occurred since 1984.
Examples of Field Use of NBR Burn Severity
Assessments:
Used to update fuels layers at Grand
Teton, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Lassen Volcano,
Jewel Cave, and national parks of Alaska.
Used to identify potential areas where
fire has impacted culture resources.
Used to help Grand Canyon National Park
natural resources staff understand the impact and the mosaic
of their recent wildland fire use fires in relation to spotted
owl habitat.
Used in Grand Teton National Park and
Bridger-Teton National Forest for lynx habitat analysis.
Used to develop “crown fire risk
trends and mapping zones" for the application of improving
firefighter safety through increasing "situational
awareness of crown fire potential" in the Salmon River
country of Idaho.
Used in national parks of Alaska to refine
and improve final fire perimeters and provide baseline information
to assess the effects of climate change over time.
Used as part of a NASA project to predict
locations of invasive species in national parks.
Contact: Nate
Benson, NPS Fire Ecology Program Lead Phone:(208)
387-5219
