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> Fighting Wildland Fire with Technology
 Fighting
Wildland Fire with Technology
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Billowing gray clouds of smoke, brilliant orange spikes of flame shooting
50 metres high, and then the blackened remains of trees in a sea of ashes–these
are the images of wildland fire in a forest. Striking with awesome power,
a forest fire brings both destruction and, ultimately, renewal.
Much is at risk when a forest fire occurs. Lives can be lost, homes
and businesses destroyed, future sources of income threatened, and substantial
resources spent on fighting even a single fire.
To make sound firefighting and forest management decisions, forest land
managers need timely and accurate forest fire information.
The Spatial Fire Management System (sFMS), developed by Natural Resources
Canada’s Canadian Forest Service, is a program that integrates fire
science models into a geographic information system environment.
It is ideally suited to deal with a range of fire management needs, having
been developed for Canada, which has 10% of the world’s forests
and annually experiences an average of 9,500 wildland fires that burn
more than 3 million hectares of forest.
Innovative fire management systems
 Predicting
and monitoring the behavior of forest fires has been a key activity of
the Canadian Forest Service, the Canadian government’s forest research
agency for over 100 years.
One of its major achievements has been development of the Canadian Forest
Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS), a set of equations based on observations
of experimental fires and measurements of forest fuel moisture. Currently
in use across Canada and in several other countries, the CFFDRS predicts
fire spread rates and fire intensity using weather, fuel (vegetation),
and topographic data. The CFFDRS equations have been incorporated into
sFMS, making them available in a spatial context.
The Spatial Fire Management System can be used at any scale and applied
to any country or region. It is being used in several Canadian provinces,
and components have been modified for use in Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia,
and New Zealand. It is also used to produce the daily products found on
the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System.
Because the models in the original sFMS were developed for Canadian fuel
types and climate conditions, its use in other countries requires adjustments
such as changes in fire danger class interpretations and development of
new fuel type models. These adaptations have been done in New Zealand
and Southeast Asia and are planned for Mexico.
Customizable modules
 At
the heart of sFMS is a set of customizable components, including fire
danger rating (based on fire weather and fire behavior prediction models),
fire occurrence prediction, optimal resource allocation and positioning,
and wildfire threat rating.
The flexibility of sFMS permits a wide variety of potential applications:
tactical fire suppression decision making, presuppression planning, strategic
planning, prescribed fire use, ecosystem-based forest management, land
use planning, and research. Users of the system include wildland fire
managers, forest and land managers, policy analysts, fire management educators,
and researchers.
Daily Operations
A key feature of the Spatial Fire Management System is that maps of current
fire danger are automatically generated daily or hourly and made available
on the Internet in the form of images or in a map application that allows
the viewer to zoom into areas of interest.
Data inputs to the system include daily or hourly weather observations
and forecasts, vegetation type and condition, and topographic information.
The resulting maps show modelled weather conditions, fuel moisture estimates,
fire ignition probability, predicted fuel consumption, fire size, and
control difficulty.
To help fire managers use remote sensing data in their daily operations,
sFMS has been designed to integrate remote sensing products as inputs
or as supplementary products such as maps of fire occurrence, grass curing,
and rainfall derived from satellite imagery. As an example, the Fire Mapping,
Modelling, and Monitoring System (Fire M3), a joint project with the Canada
Centre for Remote Sensing, uses infrared imagery for automated daily monitoring
of active fires and smoke across Canada. By incorporating this information,
sFMS can provide estimations of daily or annual fire impacts and fuel
consumption on a national scale.
In addition to its many other international activities, the Canadian
Forest Service is a partner in the Global Observation of Forest and Land
Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) network. This international effort is working
to improve the quality and availability of space and land based observations
of forests at regional and global scales in order to promote the sustainable
development of forests and to obtain an accurate, reliable, and quantitative
understanding of the terrestrial carbon budget. Tools such as sFMS help
contribute to that understanding.
Natural Resources Canada is a federal government department specializing
in the sustainable development and use of forests, energy, minerals and
metals, and land resources, both nationally and internationally. The Canadian
Forest Service is one of its sectors. The department provides scientific
research, knowledge, and expertise and is committed to ensuring that its
knowledge resources are accessible to the public through the Internet.
Visit its web site at http://www.nrcan.gc.ca.
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