An overview of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System — Quantifying, classifying, and creating fuelbeds for resource planningThis article is one of a selection of papers published in the Special Forum on the Fuel Characteristic Classification System.

Abstract

We present an overview of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS), a tool that enables land managers, regulators, and scientists to create and catalogue fuelbeds and to classify those fuelbeds for their capacity to support fire and consume fuels. The fuelbed characteristics and fire classification from this tool will provide inputs for current and future sophisticated models for the quantification of fire behavior, fire effects, and carbon accounting and enable assessment of fuel treatment effectiveness. The system was designed from requirements provided by land managers, scientists, and policy makers gathered through six regional workshops. The FCCS contains a set of fuelbeds representing the United States, which were compiled from scientific literature, fuels photo series, fuels data sets, and expert opinion. The system enables modification and enhancement of these fuelbeds to represent a particular scale of interest. The FCCS then reports assigned and calculated fuel characteristics for each existing fuelbed stratum including the canopy, shrubs, nonwoody, woody, litter–lichen–moss, and duff. Finally, the system classifies each fuelbed by calculating fire potentials that provide an index of the intrinsic capacity of each fuelbed to support surface fire behavior, support crown fire, and provide fuels for flaming, smoldering, and residual consumption. The FCCS outputs are being used in a national wildland fire emissions inventory and in the development of fuelbed, fire hazard, and treatment effectiveness maps on several national forests. Although the FCCS was built for the United States, the conceptual framework is applicable worldwide.

Impact of 2050 climate change on North American wildfire: consequences for ozone air quality

“…It depends on both fuel load and burning severity. In Yue et al (2013), we estimated fuel load over the western US using the 1 km data set from the USFS Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS, http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/fccs/, McKenzie et al, 2007 (Ottmar et al, 2007). Here, for Canada, we use the 1 km fuel type map from the Canadian Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) system, which is derived from remote sensing and forest inventory data and includes just 14 types (Nadeau et al, 2005).…”

Timing of fire relative to seed development may enable non-serotinous species to recolonize from the aerial seed banks of fire-killed trees

“…Surface fuels were modeled using the vegetation boundary fuel method in WFDS. Fuel data typical of 100 to 200 yr old closed white spruce stands with feathermoss understories (Viereck et al, 1992) were obtained from fuel bed 101 of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System 2.1 (FCCS 2.1; Ottmar et al, 2007). Fuels comprised 1-hour woody fuels, 10-hour woody fuels, feathermosses, ladder fuels, lichen, litter, white spruce saplings (height ≤ 1.4 m), dead primary shrubs (Alnus viridis ssp.…”

Fire Behavior Simulation from Global Fuel and Climatic Information

“…The most common variables for those simulations are fuel moisture (estimated as a function of temperature, humidity and precipitation), wind speed, and terrain conditions (such as slope or aspect). Examples of widely-used fire behavior models are BehavePlus [8], the National Fire Danger Rating System [9], the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction System [10], and the Fuel Characteristic Classification System [11]. These systems were developed for regional or national territories, where fuel characteristics information is available,…”