Fuel Loading and Consumption Models for Assessing Carbon Release from Wildland Fires

Don McKenzie, US Forest Service, dmck@u.washington.edu (Presenting)
Roger D Ottmar, US Forest Service, rottmar@fs.fed.us
David V Sandberg, US Forest Service (Emeritus), sandbergd@peak.org
Lara-Karena B Kellogg, University of Washington, larakarena@gmail.com

Total carbon released from wildland fires can be estimated from area burned, fuel loading, fuel consumption, and pollutant - specific emission factors. Two factors alone -- fuel loading and fuel consumption -- account for up to 80% of the error associated with estimating total carbon. We demonstrate ground-based estimates of these factors with two new software tools, the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) and Consume 3.0.

The FCCS provides an exhaustive description of fuelbed layers, including canopy, shrubs, nonwoody, woody, litter/lichen/moss, and duff. FCCS fuelbeds represent the United States, including Alaska and Hawai’i, Canada, and a portion of Mexico. They were compiled from scientific literature, fuels photo series, fuels inventories, and expert opinion, and can be easily modified to represent fuel conditions at a particular scale of interest, from single plots to 1-km cells. Fuelbeds are mapped via crosswalks to satellite-derived vegetation and land cover. This has been completed at a 1-km scale for the continental United States and could be easily extended to include all of North America. Consume 3.0 is a user-friendly software application for estimating fuel consumption and emissions produced. It imports fuelbed data directly from the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS), and the output is formatted to feed other models and provide usable outputs for estimation of total emissions and carbon generated from wildland fire. Consume can be used for all forest, shrub, and grassland types in North America. These software tools can complement and validate remotely sensed estimates of fuel loadings, consumption, and carbon release.