Description

[Excerpted from paper] Today, fire and resource managers are faced with several complex questions such as: (1) Can we protect communities and investments in managed forests more effectively through fuel treatments than fire suppression and how should they be done? (2) How can we allow fire to play a more natural role in the vast areas of Canada that are not managed without endangering communities or other high value resources? (3) Are Canadian firefighters at risk because our fire behavior prediction system does not apply to substantial areas of the Canadian forest and wildlands? We believe that we need to develop a new integrated fire prediction system that can be used to address the kinds of questions posed above. In keeping with past successes, we propose a modular system involving a suite of models encompassing the various transitions in fire behavior (i.e., probability of ignition, surface fire spread, crown fire initiation, crown fire spread, large fire/atmospheric interactions, long range spotting) as well as the immediately evident impacts of fire (e.g., depth of burn, crown scorch) for the full range of Canadian forest types.