Background: 

Fire has become an increasing concern in the forests of the Colorado rocky mountains.

 
More people are moving into areas that are prone to forest fires.  These intrusions into our natural habitats, increases the probability that fire may harm or injure private property. 

Our forest have evolved with fire.  With each different forest cover type adapting to a different frequency of fire.  This frequency has been researched and calculated by fire ecologist of the region. 

Researches have found the frequencies for the different forest cover types in the region to vary from 2 years for grass lands mountain shrub lands to as long as 800 years for the spruce fir community. 

This along with the human management influences  has had a great effect on the structure and condition of our forest stands.

The prevention and control of fire in our landscape has allowed the forest to grow in unnaturally dense stands, that have an increased amount of fuel and litter, that historically was removed by fire .

The increased fire in the summer 2000 season has increased concern not only to land owners, but to all participants in the management of our forested areas.  Knowing which areas are in the greatest risk allows careful planning of emergency resources and management responses.  Using GIS, it is possible to ascertain where these potentials for an area to ignite or maintain fire exist. 

Objective: 

Using Arcview 3.2, we will generate a potential fire hazard map. This map will be based on information of the species covertype and structure stage of the vegetation.  Each species and structure stage effects the available quality and quantity of fuel available for fire.  We have selected a township found in Larimer County Colorado, 'T8N R72W', for our evaluation, however the same process may be performed for the whole of the county or state.  The final output will display areas with the greatest potential for fire in the value ranges from 13 - 20.  The areas least prone to fire are displayed in the values of 0 -2. 

Prerequisites and Guidelines for Instructors:

All the data necessary for working through the lessons can be downloaded before beginning each exercise. The data is in the form of ArcView shapefiles and project files.

Detailed instructions of each lesson are provided for using the ArcView interface and bringing data and/or completed project files into each lesson.

Although, after a procedure is described in one lesson it is described in less detail in later lessons. The student must refer to a previous step or lesson for repeated detailed instructions. 

It is not necessary for the teacher conducting the lessons to be an expert in the ArcView software, although some basic knowledge of the functionality would be beneficial in order to help students that may run into problems. 

Hardware requirements: 

PC: minimum of 486 PC with 24 MB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 95, 3.1, or NT 4.0 operating systems. 

 

Workstation: IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlet-Packard, DELL, DEC or SGI with 32 MB RAM, running UNIX operating system. 

 

Software requirements: 

ArcView GIS Version 3.0a or higher.

 

A Web browser (to view the lesson steps).

 

Data Sources (Metadata) 

 

 
 

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Web Document by
Claudio Schneider and Jordan Levick
NR 505 
Concept of GIS
College Natural Resources
Colorado State University
Fort Collins Colorado