An Automated Tool for Deriving FARSITE Canopy Fuel Parameters from Airborne LiDAR Data

The USDA is the managing agency for 192.5 million acres, much of which is national forest. A major threat to national forests is uncontrolled wildland fires. These fires are a serious threat to goods and services provided by national forests, including natural resources (timber), forage for livestock and wildlife, outdoor recreation, and a vector to sequester carbon. Healthy forests provide habitats for various plant and animal species and protect soil quality, prevent soil erosion, and improve water quality. This project will allow the USDA to better manage forest ecosystems through innovations in technology. It will allow the USDA and other federal and commercial agencies to calculate forest biomass and potential fuels, as well as provide reproducible inputs into the federally-mandated FARSITE fire software application. The end result will produce a toolkit in which 80% of our processing methodology is automated and 20% is customizable. Customization services will be sold to end-users in the fire management, timber, and insurance industries in conjunction with our web-based visualization application FIRESCAPET. Our browser-based mapping application fuses and displays data from real-time sensor networks at active fires with numerous remote-sensing imagery and weather forecast products. The services developed under this project will directly fill a significant deficiency in the firefighting communityýýýý-the lack of accurate, relevant, and accessible data for ingestion into fire spread models.