The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS)

    www.frames.gov/iftdss

    IFTDSS Version 2.0 is now available!
    iftdss.sonomatech.com

    The Joint Fire Science Program is pleased to announce the availability of version 2.0 of the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS). Following a strategic assessment, in 2009 the JFSP undertook development and testing of an Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) focusing on the interagency hazardous fuels reduction (HFR) program. The IFTDSS software integration framework provides a demonstrated technical solution to create a standard and effective process for organizing currently stand-alone scientific software tools so that data management inefficiencies are eliminated, and project management and functional application support is enhanced.

    Version 2.0 (October 2012) is the most recent version of IFTDSS and can be found at iftdss.sonomatech.com. We invite anyone working in the area of hazardous fuels reduction to register as a test user of IFTDSS and provide comments and feedback about what they like and what they don't like. IFTDSS entered Phase V of its development process in November 2012. Phase V focuses on an evaluation of the functionality and effectiveness of IFTDSS as well as a continuation of testing, error correcting, and user interface improvement. Your feedback, comments and critique will be used to shape the final form of the software package. No registration is necessary to watch the Getting Started in IFTDSS video presentation. Simply go to the home page at iftdss.sonomatech.com and click on the video display icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen. If you do register as a guest user, then you will have access to an extensive Online Help system and a feedback button on every page that allows you to send questions, comments, or suggestions to the IFTDSS development team. Briefly, the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) is a web-based, software integration framework that manages pre-existing and newly developed software base models and their required data needs to analyze and support decisions about fuels management to mitigate wildfire risk.

    Contact Information

    If you have questions or comments about this project, please contact Mike Rauscher, JFSP Application Steward, at:
    mrauscher@bellsouth.net

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    More Information

    The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) is a web-based, software integration framework that manages pre-existing and newly developed software base models and their required data needs to analyze and support decisions about fuels management to mitigate wildfire risk. Extensive field user input resulted in the identification of five workflows:

    1. Prescribed Burn Planning and Plan Development
    2. Hazard Analysis across a landscape of interest
    3. Landscape Wildfire Risk Assessment for Current Conditions
    4. Landscape Risk Assessment for Simulated and Treated Future Landscape Conditions
    5. Assessing Fuels Treatment Effectiveness over Time

    What is a workflow? An IFTDSS workflow is defined as a user defined sequence of hazardous fuels reduction planning activities that result in the completion of a mission critical task. Many independently developed software tools are available to field users to assist in hazardous fuels reduction planning. These tools are isolated from each other. This means that they cannot easily share data among themselves nor is the data in the same format. The scope of these existing software tools is typically smaller than the scope of the mission critical task users needs to perform. This requires users to manually “string together” several of the existing software tools in an ad-hoc sequence. Users stressed the need to automate this sequencing of isolated software tools into a workflow that takes them from beginning to end of a specified task. Fuels specialists repeatedly said their job focus is to perform mission critical tasks such as Prescribed Burn Planning, Wildfire Hazard Analysis, or Wildfire Risk Assessment. They do not view their jobs as running particular software tools such as BehavePlus, FlamMap, FOFEM, Consume, etc.

    A second set of users, however, expressed the need to be able to have access to existing software tools such as FOFEM, FlamMap, FCCS, Consume, etc. and run them easily to quickly get at a particular output set of data without following the entire sequence of steps that workflows entail. The advantage of using IFTDSS for these users is that many of the individual software tools they desire to run are all in one place, operating under a single user interface, and consolidated and coordinated data management processes. Therefore IFTDSS has been designed to accommodate both types of user needs.

    For much more information about using IFTDSS, please register as a test user at iftdss.sonomatech.com.