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Hi, I'm Paige Lewis
I'm the Director of Forest and Fire for the Colorado Chapter
In the 2008 Farm Bill,
all state forestry agencies were required to develop a state wide forest resource assessment
and the purpose of these assessments was really to enable state forestry agencies
and their partners to identify the areas of greatest need, greatest opportunity and
provide them with a way to prioritize scarce resources.
In Colorado, the State Forest Service contracted with The Nature Conservancy to
help them develop the various data layers that were required
to be part of these assessments. Those data layers included
the basic forest cover as well as fire risk,
wildland urban interface, and a whole range of forest values
including watersheds, wildlife habitat
recreation and even economic opportunities.
So, The Nature Conservancy convened
a collaborative group to do this and one of our first challenges was
to identify a data source that we could use
consistently across the state, across all ownerships.
That wasn't something that we really had before that.
And for that consistent data source we looked to LANDFIRE.
Hi, I'm Jan Koenig with the Colorado Chapter
and I had the lead on the geo-spatial analysis for the forest assessment.
We used 30 to 40 data layers
in addition to base data for that project
and one of the most fundamental data layers was the forest dataset,
and we had several that we considered; we knew that we
could include LANDFIRE's existing vegetation type
because we have 24 million acres of forest in Colorado
and so we were at the appropriate scale for LANDFIRE data. We also considered Southwest REGAP
because it's more accurate for fine-scale
land cover classes. However, we were aggregating these
classes into 10 broad forest types, and
so the accuracy was acceptable for our project.
And there were a number benefits that came from using LANDFIRE.
It was compatible with several other datasets
that we were using in the project that had
been developed using LANDFIRE, such as the probability
of ignition, a dataset that was developed by
a contractor to the Colorado State Forest Service
and the wildfire intensity index that had been
developed by the U S Forest Service.
It's an extensive set of datasets,
and we like this because this was a one-year project and we didn't know
what additional data we might need for this.
We ended up also using the BioPhysical Settings
and the Departure Index. We also had the benefit of
Jim Smith, who helped us know how to interpret
the data correctly, the departure index,
and the FRCC
(the fire regime condition class) are particularly prone to misunderstanding. The LANDFIRE team
has done an excellent job of documenting their work and
making that available on their website.
If you're considering LANDFIRE
for your project, it's worth your time to take a look at this
website and understand how the data was developed.
Thanks to Jan's great work
and valuable help from Jim Smith, and the lengthy deliberations
of our collaborative working group, we were able to come up with a
really comprehensive set of data layers that turned into this
really valuable state assessment that the State Forest Service developed,
and also developed a strategy to go along with it that would guide them for the next five years,
and both this assessment and the strategy have really served to
inform decision-making not only by the State Forest Service,
but also by a wide range of other partners. And, this was really a great accomplishment
because it is the first, state-wide, comprehensive
all-ownerships assessment that Colorado had for our forests.
And we as The Nature Conservancy have continued to find
a lot of valuable uses for LANDFIRE data, and are,
in fact, starting on a whole new project with the Pike National Forest and
the southern Front Range, so it's really been a great resource for us.