In the 2012 President's Budget Request, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is terminated. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within this web site will be removed on January 15, 2012. For more information, please refer to the NBII Program Termination page.
A variety of fire modelling software is available for scientists and managers to use. A comprehensive listing, along with descriptions and downloads for most of these packages are located at the System for Environmental Management: www.fire.org
Fire
Photo Credit: Arthur Allen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Digital Library
Wildland fire plays a natural and necessary role in shaping the composition, structure, and ecological processes of many of the world's ecosystems. Species adaptations to fire are many and varied; depending on the plant communities present in a given fire regime, fire can help to induce seed release, flowering or fruiting in shrubs, and seral changes in stands with trees having fire-resistant or growth-related fire adaptations. Fire also helps to clear fuel buildup in understories, cleanse areas of disease and insect outbreaks, and/or cycle nutrients into the soil.
Prompted by resource interests (i.e., timber extraction) and social objectives (e.g., protection of homes built along the urban-wildland interface), suppression dominated fire management policies in the U.S. for much of the 20th century. While it remains a prevalent management response in this country, the link between suppression-related fuel build-up and catastrophic wildfires has seen growing recognition, and the advancement of fire science has improved the capacity of managers to address individual fires with more discretion depending on their specific ecological and social contexts.
To learn more about fire ecology and fire science, visit the links below and throughout this page:
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), a partnership of six federal agencies, was established in 1998 to provide scientific information and support for wildland fuel and fire management programs.
The U.S. Fire Learning Network implemented the methodology to map Fire Regime Condition Class, or FRCC, a measure of the degree to which the vegetation and disturbance regime of a given area are departed from historical conditions. The Intermountain West FLN is presently offering this innovative technology and other quantitative tools to help five landscape-scale projects achieve fire and other conservation goals.
The Fire Research And Management Exchange System or FRAMES is a web-based information management system designed to facilitate information transfer between wildland fire science and management.
The stated goal is "to make wildland fire data, metadata, tools, and other information resources easy to find, access, distribute, compare, and use."
FRAMES offers a single secure access point to critical information and applications such as datasets, databases, publications, decision support tools, simulation models, interactive CD-ROMs, videos, and other tools.
The NBII Program is administered by the Biological Informatics Program of the U.S. Geological Survey