More Info BAER, RAVG, and MTBS

I want to spell out each of the three programs mentioned in the post below. I’m involved with three programs: BAER, RAVG, and MTBS. All are related, and all have national application.

BAER: I create maps representing soil burn severity for emergency assessment for BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) teams. They use my product (which I call the BARC, or Burned Area Reflectance Classification) in models to come up with a final product that shows burn severity in terms of hydrologic response. In other words, BAER teams are interested in how the soil will react to a weather event following a wildfire.

I provide this service for emergency assessments, which means I do this as close as possible to fire containment. BAER teams only have 7 calendar days to make their whole assessment, and my map products are an integral part early on in the process.

RAVG: This is a new program that we’re just now starting to implement nationally. In previous years, Region 5 (California) has been creating maps of vegetation severity (mortality) following a wildfire. The folks interested in this product are really silviculturists and are interested in salvageable timber. The idea here is that within 30 days (rapid assessment rather than emergency assessment) of a wildfire, I’ll create a map similar to the BARC but using a slightly modified algorithm (RdNBR – or Relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio) as this is a map tailored to vegetation mortality, not soil condition.

We will do this on all fires on Forest Service lands greater than 1,000 acres. There is obvious synergy here with the BAER program, although with the relaxed timeframe, RAVG can afford to wait for better imagery where BAER can’t.

MTBS: This program has been going on for over a year now. The idea here is very similar to RAVG, but on an extended assessment approach. This means that if the fire burns in 2005, we will wait until the peak of green in the next growing season (typically spring 2006, depending on vegetation type) to map its effects. Like RAVG, we will map all fires greater than 1,000 acres in the west (west of 97 degrees longitude) and all fires greater than 500 acres in the east. We will do this for current year fires as well as all fires back to 1984 (to leverage the Landsat data archive).

This is a huge project because we have to select pre- and post-fire Landsat scenes for every fire that meets our size threshold back to 1984. Then we have to process and manage these data. And we have to map the fire perimeter and severity (like we would for RAVG – vegetation response) for each fire. Like I said, this is a huge project.