August 29, 2013
35 minutes. That's how long it took for the Idaho State University GIS Center to produce a detailed report that gave Bureau of Land Management wildfire managers information they needed to plan for the recovery of the State Wildfire that burned on the Idaho-Utah border earlier this month – and the wildfire wasn’t even out yet.
In the past, the information collected on
everything from burn severity and fire intensity to slope, vegetation
and soil type would have taken as long as weeks to collect and
distribute.
But
now, using satellite imagery and a Geographic Information Systems
mapping tool created by ISU GIS Training and Research Center and NASA's
Applied Sciences Program, fire managers quickly have pertinent
information at their fingertips on their computers. Wildfire managers
may soon also have it on their mobile devices and cell phones. ISU and
NASA are working in partnership with the BLM and Idaho Department of
Lands on this project.
The new program, still in its testing phase,
has already been used on several Idaho wildfires, including the Pony and
Elk Creek Complex Wildfire in south-central Idaho and the Mabey Fire
near Bancroft.
The official name of the project is Rehabilitation Capability Convergence for Ecosystem Recovery (RECOVER). Initial
funding of nearly $180,000 for this project is being provided by NASA's
Applied Sciences Program and the NASA's High-end Computing Program.
"The RECOVER project is one of the most
interesting and important activities currently funded by NASA's Applied
Sciences Program," said John Schnase, at the
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "We're using a variety of advanced
cloud computing, web services, and data grid technologies to
dramatically improve the decision-making activities associated with
fighting wildfires. We're also setting the stage to use new types of
observational data that will be produced by future NASA missions."
Those accomplishments are gaining notice: BLM
wildfire managers on the state, regional and national level have
already contacted the ISU GIS Center expressing their excitement about
the application.
"We’ve already had conference calls with the
Washington, D.C. office and the Boise state leads," said Keith Weber,
ISU’s GIS Director. "Managers are excited about it and we just finished
our test sites in June. The important people in this are the fire
fighters on the ground fighting these fires, but what we’re providing is
a tool to support them for their safety responding to a fire and the
recovery afterwards."
Weber and NASA would like to offer the program nationwide: for now it is being tested in Idaho.
"ISU
is a national leader in remote sensing," said Howard Grimes, ISU vice
president for research and economic development. "But, most importantly,
our expertise in this area serves the state and region by contributing
to our ability to provide ecosystem services for managing a broad array
of land and water use management issues across the state."
RECOVER is a computerized
decision support system that is automatically deployable and
site-specific. It brings together in a single application the
information necessary, in the form of multi-layered GIS maps, for Burned
Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams to plan reseeding strategies and
monitor ecosystem recovery in the aftermath of wildfires. It is also
proving useful for managers on the ground to fight wildfires while
they’re occurring.
The GIS maps of fire areas are based on
satellite imagery of the burned or burning areas provided by NASA and
other sources. Once the ISU GIS Training and Research Center receives
that imagery with the parameters of the fire, it can be processed within
a few hours or sometimes, as noted above, as little as 35 minutes.
RECOVER uses state-of-the-art cloud-based
data management technologies developed by NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center to improve performance, reduce cost and provide site-specific
flexibility for each fire. This technology is also being used in the
NASA Center for Climate Simulation, which sets the stage for using
climate data products in future versions of the RECOVER system.
The BLM’s policy is to have an initial
Emergency Stabilization plan submitted within seven calendar days of the
wildfire control date, and the complete Emergency Stabilization plan
submitted within 21 calendar days to the appropriate state and/or
Washington office for approval. The new RECOVER system is significantly
improving the decision-making process in this tight timeframe, Weber
said.
For more information on the RECOVER project, visit http://giscenter.isu.edu/research/Techpg/nasa_RECOVER/index.htm or http://www.earthzine.org/2013/06/22/a-new-application-to-facilitate-post-fire-recovery-and-rehabilitation-in-savanna-ecosystems/.
More information on the NASA Applied Sciences Program http://appliedsciences.nasa.gov.
source: http://www2.isu.edu & http://geospatialworld.net
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