ArcFuels 10 system overview
Fire behavior modeling and geospatial analyses can provide tremendous insight for land managers as they grapple with the complex problems frequently encountered in wildfire risk assessments and fire and fuels management planning. Fuel management is often a particularly complicated process in which the benefits and potential impacts of fuel treatments need to be demonstrated in the context of land management goals and public expectations. The fuel treatment planning process is complicated by the lack of data assimilation among fire behavior models and weak linkages to geographic information systems (GIS), corporate data, and desktop office software. ArcFuels10 is a streamlined fuel management planning and wildfire risk assessment system that creates a trans-scale (stand to large landscape) interface to apply various forest growth and fire behavior models within an ArcGIS platform to design and test fuel treatment alternatives. The new version of ArcFuels has been implemented on Citrix at the Forest Service Enterprise Production Data Center, eliminating the need for desktop GIS, improving connectivity to the corporate geospatial databases housed at the data centers, and enabling sharing of information among Forest Service employees. This overview introduces ArcFuels10 and the tools available within the system. Further information, including download information, demonstration data, and a tutorial, can be found at http://www.fs.fed.us/wwetac/arcfuels/index.html.