Current Topics:
 Taking it to the "MAT"
GIS Survey
Enterprise Data Sources
Large Fire
Supporting Suppression Efforts
For more information visit http://fpa.nifc.gov
or call Venetia Gempler
208-947-3786
Fire Program Analysis
Fire Program Analysis (FPA) system is a common interagency decision support tool for wildland fire planning and budgeting.
This tool will enable wildland fire managers in the five federal land management agencies to plan jointly.
The Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) is a cooperative interagency organization dedicated to achieving consistent implementation of the goals, actions, and policies in the National Fire Plan and the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. The Council provides leadership and oversight to ensure policy coordination, accountability, and effective implementation of the National Fire Plan and the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy.
The FPA System:
- will be designed to encourage state, local, and tribal agency participation.
- incorporates geospatial data which provide the means to map levels of wildland fire risk on lands across the country.
- generates outcomes from fire planning units that
provide information to the national budget planning process.
- will provide a way for land managers to compare
trade-offs between wildland fire program components.
- is a tool to ensure wildland fire management actions help meet performance measures outlined in the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy.
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Taking it to the "MAT" (Management Advisory Team)
Both FPA businesses leads are actively recruiting members for the FPA Management Advisory Team. The membership of the MAT will be line officers throughout DOI Bureaus and the Forest Service. MAT members will provide the critical link between the project and line officers. We are striving to have the team members identified by the end of August. The creation of this team will fill the last “box” on the organization chart in the FPA Charter.
GIS Data Layer and Requirements Survey
A web-based information call will be sent to the FPU planners in early August via the FPA list service. The information call will help the Project identify the status of the FPU, Fire Management Units (FMU) and Fire Workload Area (FWA) boundary data layers. The online questionnaire requests information about local fuels data to help plan how they will be incorporated into the IRS and large fire modeling. Responses to the web-based information call are due no later than August 29th, and will take less than 20 minutes to complete.
Enterprise Data Sources Will Reduce Field Workload
Minimizing the workload on the field is one of the primary goals of the Team as FPA is developed. One process within the system will do just that: fire event scenarios will be created by pulling the historic fire occurrence and fire weather observations directly from each agency's systems of record, saving the FPUs additional time and work. FPUs will need to ensure their agency's system of record is up to date and accurate for their fire program analysis time frame.
In the past, fire planners had to export data out of their agency's system of record and then import these fire history records into PCHA. Once there, the data were corrected for use in developing fire event scenarios and for other applications. However, most of the time those corrections to fire reports and weather records were not exported back into their official system of record. FPA will rely solely on each agency's system of record, and not require users to create and update fire history records in PCHA.
[Agency systems of record include: Wildland Fire Management Information (WFMI), National Interagency Fire Management Integrated Database (NIFMID), Fire Management Information System (FMIS), and various State systems.]
The FPA Large Fire Model
The Large Fire Model combines fire simulations and statistical analysis based on the Fire Spread Probability (FSPro) model developed at the Missoula Fire Lab. The term “large fire” is used to reference fires that may spread far from the ignition location or require management action that extends beyond the initial response phase. FSPro runs a series of simulations that vary fuels, weather, suppression and treatment to calculate the probability of a large fire for points on a landscape.
The data from these simulations are used to create a statistical regression model that determines relationships between final fire size, fuels, weather and topography. The results from the statistical analysis are used to extrapolate the impact of fuels treatments and preparedness fire resources on large fire behavior. This enables fire planners to evaluate alternative investment strategies in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and cost.
FPA Team Members Support Fire Suppression Efforts
Consistent with the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior's memorandum on “Providing Assistance for Firefighting Efforts”, FPA team members will accept fire assignments as their FPA workload allows. Many team members have acquired valuable fire line leadership skills throughout their careers; their assignments will fill critical needs during the Preparedness Level 5. These assignments will ensure that the FPA developers remain grounded in their fire skills and in touch with the primary users of the system they are developing.
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