Modeling Regional-Scale Wildland Fire Emissions with the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System

As carbon modeling tools become more comprehensive, spatialdata are needed to improve quantitative maps of carbon emissions from fire.The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) provides mappedestimates of carbon emissions from historical forest fires in the United Statesthrough a web browser. WFEIS improves access to data and provides a consistentapproach to estimating emissions at landscape, regional, and continentalscales. The system taps into data and tools developed by the U.S. Forest Serviceto describe fuels, fuel loadings, and fuel consumption and merges informationfrom the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration on fire location and timing. Currently, WFEIS provides webaccess to Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) burnedarea for North America and U.S. fire-perimeter maps from the MonitoringTrends in Burn Severity products from the USGS, overlays them on 1-km fuelmaps for the United States, and calculates fuel consumption and emissions withan open-source version of the Consume model. Mapped fuel moisture is derivedfrom daily meteorological data from remote automated weather stations. Inaddition to tabular output results, WFEIS produces multiple vector and rasterformats. This paper provides an overview of the WFEIS system, including theweb-based system functionality and datasets used for emissions estimates.WFEIS operates on the web and is built using open-source software componentsthat work with open international standards such as keyhole markuplanguage (KML). Examples of emissions outputs from WFEIS are presentedshowing that the system provides results that vary widely across the manyecosystems of North America and are consistent with previous emissionsmodeling estimates and products.