The most exciting thing to me about LANDFIRE: it's a diverse product suite
that can be applied in more ways than I can possibly describe.
Virtually any application that deals with what's on the land
or is occurring on the land can utilize LANDFIRE program products in some way,
now, for 20 years. And to have a 20-year record of
that is pretty amazing.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth,
a podcast produced at the USGS EROS Center.
Our podcast focuses on our ever changing planet
and on the people here at EROS and across the globe, who use remote
sensing to monitor and study the health of Earth.
My name is Tom Adamson.
The LANDFIRE Program was established in 2004
to provide data to help with decisions about wildfire management.
The data, partly derived from satellite imagery and generated at EROS, is
used to map disturbance to the landscape and provide information about vegetation.
LANDFIRE has now been around for 20 years.
Today, we're talking with a few of the people who have been with LANDFIRE
that entire time.
I'll let them introduce themselves.
Jim Smith.
I'm the LANDFIRE program lead for The Nature Conservancy.
I'm Brian Tolk.
I am a data analyst / scientist with the LANDFIRE Disturbance team.
I am a subject matter expert on disturbance.
I'm Brenda Lundberg, and I am the LANDFIRE data administrator.
And we collect reference data for LANDFIRE, including vegetation
and plot data and disturbance and treatment perimeters.
Deborah Lissfelt and
my primary role on LANDFIRE is working with the reference database.
Jim, could you please give us a brief overview of the LANDFIRE Project?
What was the problem that it was originally designed to solve?
Let's just say the genesis of the LANDFIRE program
was the 2004 National Fire Plan
under President George W. Bush.
During those years, it was recognized that the wildland
fire issue was really starting to grow.
More acres burned more intensively, and we didn't really have
the data or strategy needed to tackle that particular problem.
So a group that included individuals
from the federal land management agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey
and The Nature Conservancy got together and conceived
of the LANDFIRE Project at that time.
At its heart, the LANDFIRE Program is a data integrator
and data creator with the goal of supporting wildland
fire and natural resource management communities
by providing a comprehensive suite of products for every acre
in the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii
and primary island territories.
How is The Nature Conservancy involved in LANDFIRE?
What's its role?
Let me first mention, Tom, that the LANDFIRE program
is really funded by the Department of the Interior, Office of WildLANDFIRE
and the U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management Branch,
each of which designates a business lead for the program.
Now, I'm here representing The Nature Conservancy LANDFIRE Team,
which is a part of our organization's North America Region science team.
Along with the USGS EROS Science Center,
we're major partners to the LANDFIRE program,
and TNC's roles primarily pertain to communications,
user support, applications, development, sometimes production assistance,
and to being subject matter experts for ecological products and questions.
So, Jim, can you name a few of the big benefits of LANDFIRE?
How does it help?
Well, in my mind, it's simply
put, the major benefit of the LANDFIRE program
is that its rich suite of products is there for everyone,
everywhere, publicly available, free of charge.
When someone in some area
has better local data for their ownership,
LANDFIRE products can extend that data coverage outside their boundaries.
Also, where information is absent or incomplete,
LANDFIRE products can provide foundational data
that can be used directly after some local review
and sometimes revision, or perhaps combined with local data
where there are thematic or geographic gaps in their datasets.
It's sometimes hard to believe, but there still is not sufficient data
out there to really support wildland fire and natural resource management
across the country and LANDFIRE is is helping fulfill that need.
Let's bring in Brian.
Do you have any examples of benefits of how LANDFIRE helps?
If it wasn't very clear,
one of the things is just having this comprehensive suite
of fire supporting geospatial data, for all the U.S.
and territories.
And, you know, one of the problems that we were trying to
so overcome was what happens if you're managing a particular area
in the country, whether it be BLM land or Forest Service land,
and a fire starts outside of that area, but then burns towards your area,
are those areas outside?
Does the data match? Is it the same spatial data?
Are we mapping the same things?
And LANDFIRE brings that continuity together
so that all that data is available in one place.
It can be accessed easily.
And throughout the years, you know, we've just gotten better at that.
And a lot more folks have been leveraging our data
in that way and using it.
Jim mentioned the products that we have.
I went through earlier and coounted up, and we've got over 30 mainstream
fire relevant geospatial data products that we're providing.
So that's how I think that, another way that we provide benefits
and help to the fire community and natural resources community.
I can't help but think of the word clearinghouse
or maybe central location is a better way to put it.
Is that fair to say?
LANDFIRE is kind of a central location for all of this data and these products?
I think that's very fair.
Yeah.
Everything can be accessed through the LANDFIRE.gov website.
Brian, I'll stick with you for this one.
You mentioned that you're kind of a disturbance product subject matter expert.
So can you break that down?
What is meant by disturbance?
And what does LANDFIRE provide in that realm?
Right.
The term gets thrown around generically, but what we're doing is trying
to find changes on the landscape, either physical or biological.
So if something has been modified
on the landscape, it's going to change how a fire might burn through that area.
Or it can be used for a lot of other projects or
natural resources type things as well.
But I should mention that when we talk about a disturbance, we're talking about,
like, natural events like wildfire, tornadoes, insect outbreaks.
And then you have human activities like logging, urbanization, ag conversion
and those kind of things.
So what we're trying to do is we look at this as a two pronged approach.
We have satellite imagery that we go through
and curate so that we find where these changes are occurring.
And we have a team of mappers
that goes through, and we try to weed out what's real change versus
what seasonal change due to things like just a dry year versus a wet year.
And ultimately we come up with a final product
that has identified, okay, there has been fuel reduction in these areas.
and then we use it through modeling and other state transition
type activities to, to update the vegetation of fuels products,
which then are leveraged by the fire community.
We also incorporate treatment activities that are reported
by federal, state and local management agencies
and what that is is things like prescribed fire activity, chemical treatments,
if there's been thinning or logging activity,
we can get that information in there.
And a lot of times, we'll identify
that with our satellite imagery too.
But many of these might not be discernible from a satellite.
And therefore, having that information in there is beneficial so that
agencies can track what kind of activities have occurred over time
and give them a little more insight into what is occurring in there.
We have annual disturbance products, and then we also have
a ten year historical disturbance product,
which takes those annual products and puts them together
into a single package to make it easier to discern.
And then we also have a fuel disturbance product, which is specific
to fuel activity and how the fuel models
have changed and, and can be, modified.
Let's bring in Brenda and Deb as well.
Brenda, another product is vegetation layers.
Can you describe what that is?
Yeah.
LANDFIRE produces several different vegetation layers.
Some of the current vegetation layers that we produce include existing
vegetation cover and existing vegetation height, which contain life
form, vegetation cover and height estimates for trees, shrubs and herbs.
We also produce two existing vegetation type layers.
We have one existing vegetable layer based on systems,
which is a terrestrial ecological systems that shows the distribution
of those across the landscape.
And that was a classification scheme developed by NatureServe.
We also produced an existing vegetation layer, using NVC groups,
which shows the distribution of the U.S. National
Vegetation Classification groups across the landscape.
LANDFIRE also does produce some potential vegetation layers,
and those include the biophysical settings layer, which represents
vegetation systems that may have been dominant
on the landscape prior to Euro-American settlement.
And we also have an environmental site potential layer, which is vegetation
that could be supported by a given site based on the biophysical environment.
So we have quite a few different vegetation layers that we produce.
I've heard both Brenda and Deb described as data hawks.
Does that sound fair to to call you that?
Yes it does.
Okay. Deb, how about you take this one?
How do you deal with all of the data for these products?
Well, there's kind of two sides to this coin.
I mean, there's the gathering process
and then there's the ingesting or processing of the data.
So on the sort of the process and ingesting of the data side of things,
part of it is 20 years of familiarity with a lot of these data products
between Brenda and myself. We've been looking at this data for years,
and that's helped us with our efficiencies.
And then we've also in the LANDFIRE
teams, we've developed some GIS tools
and some process developments that have really increased our efficiency.
That's allowed us to now do an actual annual update,
which was not possible in years previously.
And then we also access a lot of data online.
There's been a lot of consolidation amongst online databases so that we
we can access things a little bit more easily, more efficiently.
We just collect a lot of data from a lot of different sources
like, federal, state and local sources.
And it comes in so many different formats.
So one of the big,
you know, lists we do is we get it into a like format and into our LANDFIRE format.
So the data can be compiled and analyzed.
Okay.
You're making this usable for people.
Yes, exactly.
Let me go back to Jim with this.
With all of this data, I imagine there might be places where this is
useful for things other than just fire management.
Well, that's certainly true,
Tom, and one of the major reasons
that The Nature Conservancy is involved in the LANDFIRE program
is because of the value of these foundational datasets
for not only wildland fire management applications,
but natural resource management and conservation applications as well.
It can be used to evaluate the costs and benefits
of different resource management scenarios,
restoration scenarios.
It can be used in ways that we never imagined,
because when we built these datasets, they were not available.
And now we have these 30 plus
datasets that we can use in so many ways,
like, assessing vegetation condition continent wide.
It was just not possible before LANDFIRE began.
So yes, there probably more non fire
applications of land fire program products than fire.
Jim, this year also marks the first time LANDFIRE is offering annual updates.
What are the benefits to users of offering this?
Truthfully, if you ask any data consumer,
they would probably want to have the most current information possible.
It's always helpful to know what is there now and what is happening now.
But really, for our key user communities such as wildland fire,
having timely information is really critical.
Knowing which areas have already experienced a wildland fire or when that fire occurred
and how severe it was, is really, really important to understanding
the risks of additional fires and what the post-fire
effects were and what are the rehabilitation needs.
This kind of application would also apply
to non fire disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes.
They can have intensive and extensive impacts.
The importance of knowing the impacts
of sudden landscape changes is the primary reason
LANDFIRE is now delivering products annually
to really help reduce the threats to life and property.
Brian, do you have anything to add to that?
Just from a fire perspective,
I would say just having-- we are providing intermediate products
that are provided earlier in the year then our final products,
which has basically modified datasets
so including the events that Brenda and Deb manage.
But the idea there is just to let land managers have that information
ahead of their fire season
so that they can have that when it comes to their modeling
or any other activities that they need to prepare for the upcoming year.
Everybody would like it sooner rather than later.
Yeah, indeed.
And this must mean that we're processing
and gathering more data, more information even quicker.
So, Brenda, can you speak to that?
How do we gather so much data so quickly?
We do put out a yearly data call asking for data disturbance
and treatment parimeters and vegetation and field plot data.
And you know, we send it out to our contact list
and many of those folks do submit their data on a yearly basis.
So we rely a lot on those data contributions.
A lot of agencies and other sources have moved their data into online databases.
So that means we can just go ahead
and collect the data when we need it, which is super convenient.
And then, you know, we've made improvements
in how we process data. For example, our disturbance and treatment
perimeter data always went through a topology process,
which we did by hand, which was very long and time consuming.
And we've made improvements.
And we now have a topology tool that does it all automatically.
And so it's been a huge time saver.
And it's allowed us to process data
a lot faster and be able to do these annual updates.
Additionally, I would just mention that the online
sources of data, for instance,
we use the National Interagency Fire Center for a lot of,
the our fire data. Previously, we would access fire data
from many different sources online, but there's been sort of a consolidation
of fire data online into single, you know, databases,
so it's keeping us from duplicating our efforts from accessing
the same fire data from different sources across all online sources.
So that's really contributed to the efficiency of
accessing data and not duplicating efforts.
How do we know the data is accurate? From a disturbance
standpoint, I should preface this by saying there's
approximately 9 billion 30-meter pixels that cover the lower 48 states alone.
So, you know, it's not unusual to have something go awry.
You know,
maybe, slip through the cracks. And we've gotten a lot better
over time of making sure that those sorts of things don't happen.
I look at it from our standpoint, what we're doing is
we kind of have a four prong approach to this, or a four step.
We have visual inspection when we're doing the mapping activities.
Once we're done, we kind of zoom out and look at overall patterns
and try to identify if something doesn't look right,
similar to what Brenda was saying and Deb, that
we've been doing this for a long time.
And we have some very experienced individuals doing the work.
And so we can kind of sometimes pick out like, this just doesn't look right.
It looks like there's way too much
occurring in this area considering what we've seen in the past.
So that will come into play.
We also have automated quality assurance checks too,
that, you know, look for inconsistencies in the way the data is coming together.
And so we'll find things that way.
We've also done work where we've compared to other data
sets like, NLCD and LCMAP, where we'll look to see if
what we've mapped jives with what they have. In the past,
and if things don't match up right, then we'll take a better look at it.
And then finally, we do listen to users.
And by providing user feedback, it's not uncommon
that folks will say this isn't looking right in this area.
They're the experts in the ground.
They know what's happening in their particular locations that they manage.
So we'll step back and take a a look at it
and see if it's something systematic on our end that we will adjust,
or if it's just part of the data that's going into it
and determine whether changes in those areas are warranted or not.
Brian, you mentioned user feedback.
Let me let Jim speak to that as well.
What what else do you hear from users of the data,
and how else do you incorporate their feedback?
My teammates and I are so lucky
to work with the user community of LANDFIRE,
and I can honestly say that some users are absolutely ecstatic
and say that they really couldn't do
what they do without LANDFIRE products.
Now, some users have indicated that products,
you know, need some revision for local use.
And you have to remember that LANDFIRE, the LANDFIRE program and
LANDFIRE products were developed for specific purposes,
related mostly to national, regional and large landscape applications.
So they do not necessarily match the needs of every user
or application as they're delivered out of the box.
But they can be edited, they can be reviewed,
they can be modified, and I can say that LANDFIRE products
have been cited in more than a thousand published journal articles,
according to Google Scholar, which indicates to me at least,
that the products are useful for a wide variety of purposes,
you know, outside the original intent and original design of the program.
So I feel like we can
honestly say that they've had value to these user communities.
But we do hear sometimes that things need
some work, and that we listen to them.
And we've made many, many, many changes over the years.
Big changes, not minor changes.
Big things have changed in the program because of what we hear from users.
And one of them is annual deliveries.
People really wanted annual deliveries,
and it took a lot of work and a lot of effort there
at the USGS EROS Science Center to really make that happen.
So that's a great example of listening to users and really delivering
what they need.
If you don't mind, let me jump back to something that Brian mentioned.
He mentioned that there are 9 billion 30-meter
pixels across the lower 48 states.
That's a reference to the Landsat data.
Landsat 30-meter pixels.
So is Landsat kind of the primary input to the data that LANDFIRE uses?
We grew up on, Landsat, obviously,
that's been our bread and butter along the way.
But one of the major improvements that we've made here in the
in the last 3 to 4 years has been the incorporation
of what's called the harmonized Landsat Sentinel data.
So Sentinel is somewhat of a companion satellite, and it's based out of Europe.
The European Space Agency manages that.
Folks realized early on that if they coordinated those two datasets,
that the amount of coverage that the world would receive is tremendous.
So that was a huge benefit.
If you think about it, when we were back
using just one satellite, we had a pass once every 16 days.
And if that area that we were trying to
map was cloudy, that meant we had to wait 16 days later to get the next image.
As time went, we added Landsat nine and eight data so that doubled the amount.
So we were looking at every eight day coverage.
And then once we added Sentinel data and we were looking at, depending
on where you're at in the United States or territories,
we would have coverage every up to every 2 or 3 days.
So we are able to just really bump up the quality of our imagery,
our image composites, as we call them, producing a lot more cloud free data.
And it made a world of difference when it comes to our mapping
and making our disturbance and vegetation products to build from.
I think it's important to add in a couple
of really important points
about the LANDFIRE program, particularly about
key wildland fire
systems that ingest LANDFIRE data.
One called the Wildland Fire Decision Support System,
and one called the Interagency Fuels Treatment and Decision Support System,
that are basically dependent upon the LANDFIRE programs.
And they are key platforms.
If there is a wildland fire incident or during planning
for, wildland fire treatments or silvacultural treatments,
those systems are really, really important.
Those depend upon LANDFIRE
program products to actually exist and operate.
Now, I'd like to ask all of you the same question.
What's the most exciting thing about LANDFIRE from your perspective?
Let's start with you, Brenda.
It's been exciting to see all the improvements and innovations
that have happened throughout the years.
You know, I think one of my favorite moments is actually when we finished
LANDFIRE National. It was such a Herculean effort.
We are developing these products for the first time for the whole United States.
There are a lot of challenges.
And the LANDFIRE team was able to come together and figure out solutions.
There was just a real sense of accomplishment
when we completed LANDFIRE National and produced our original map layers.
So that's one of my favorite moments.
Deb, how about you?
As Brenda was saying, you know, I think the the monumental effort
that it took to, you know, get to annual updates
is what I'm most excited about.
You know, between the collaboration
amongst the teams, you know, it was a huge effort,
took a long time to get there, is what is most exciting for me.
And Brian, how about you?
It's always frustrating
if you're trying to find data and information and you're searching
on the web to look for something that can support your work,
and when you go out there and you think you finally have
found something, and then download it and you find out that it's
not in the same projection, or it's not in the same pixel space,
it's different resolution data, or it's got some weaknesses
that you might not have realized when you were first pulling it in.
That kind of stuff can be very frustrating.
And so to have the data that we do, everything's geolocated, everything's
in the same projection, everything's easy to use and pull into applications.
All that stuff is really exciting.
And I think that it just goes to show what the value
of the products that we produce and how they're being used.
And it makes you feel like your work is worthwhile.
I'm excited about, you know, the increase in the amount of imagery
that's going to be going up there towards the end of the end of the decade.
We're going to be launching more Landsat satellites and
we'll be able to incorporate those into our composite imagery.
And there's been some discussions about even getting higher resolution
data and, which just give us more precision.
And that would be huge, I think, into
all the activities we've talked about, whether it be fire or any kind of other
research activities or or natural resource mapping.
And, Jim, what is most exciting to you about LANDFIRE?
Well, I got a couple of things.
I think one of them is, you know,
despite this being sometimes called the information age,
believe it or not, you know, useful data are still scarce.
You know, it may not seem like it at times,
but when we're talking about data that spans a continent
that really can support a myriad of applications, that dataset,
did not really exist before LANDFIRE,
so the most exciting thing to me about LANDFIRE is that the products
are all lands, regardless of ownership, that the data is foundational.
And by that I mean it's a diverse product suite
that can be applied in more ways than I can possibly describe.
Virtually any application that deals with
what's on the land or is occurring on the land can utilize
LANDFIRE program products in some way, now for 20 years.
And to have a 20 year record of that is pretty amazing.
I believe LANDFIRE is actually a model
for interagency inter organizational collaboration.
There are tremendous, complicated things that we have to deal
with on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, from year to year.
And the Department of the interior, the U.S.
Forest Service, the USGS, and The Nature Conservancy and others
have really found a way to collaborate and be effective
and efficient over that time, which is really amazing.
So I consider that to be an exciting thing about the program.
I'm excited about the continued evolution of the product suite,
you know, as technology and user needs change.
And we all know that both are going to change
in ways that we cannot fully foresee right now.
So LANDFIRE program leadership
really recognizes the need to evolve
and respond to users to remain useful.
I've been in the data business for 40 years.
I've been a LANDFIRE partner for 20 years,
and I have literally seen faces light up
When someone understands
the diverse nature of this product suite
and what they can accomplish with comprehensive datasets and models.
It still
sometimes gives me chill bumps
when I'm working with someone and introduce them to the products and
really see their ideas begin to percolate and see what they can do.
So those are those are my favorite moments from the past is dealing with users
and seeing them light up when they see what they can do.
One thing I was wondering,
did you want to acknowledge the folks that have been on the project in the past?
You know, I feel like our leadership has been really strong over the years.
Yeah, sure,
Brian, that's a good point.
And we have been extremely fortunate to have leaders
from the Department of Interior and
U.S. Forest Service that have really helped us through the years.
And that would be Henry Bastian, who has been been the business
lead for the DOI for probably going on 20 years, 19.5 or 20 years.
Dan Crittendon,
who was the original U.S. Forest Service business lead,
who retired a few years ago. Then Frank Fay and now Jim Menakis and
without good leadership and good representation of programs
like this to those, to those agencies,
we would not have survived and wouldn't have thrived like we have over the years,
Brian, so thanks for reminding me to acknowledge
what they have contributed to our work
and have made this possible.
I'd like to thank Jim Smith, Brian Tolk,
Brenda Lundberg, and Deborah Lissfelt for joining us on this episode of Eyes
on Earth, where we talked about the LANDFIRE program's valuable data
that it has been providing now for the last 20 years.
And thank you, listeners.
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