Project 1. Coordinated monitoring of fire impacts throughout the South Atlantic
Funding from Wildland Fire Resilient Landscapes is supporting prescribed fire on land managed by a diversity of public and private organizations, many of which have established protocols for monitoring fire effects. Some only monitor vegetation, while others monitor additional impacts on species and ecological processes. Our team proposes to work with key partners to integrate data from existing monitoring and improve the coordination of future fire monitoring in the South Atlantic. Efforts will build off of existing cross-organizational efforts to coordinate fire impacts monitoring in pine ecosystems with a special emphasis on rapid, efficient data collection and methods that can be utilized by a wide range of partners. In particular, this effort will require close coordination with existing monitoring programs run by USFWS, NPS, TNC, state heritage and wildlife programs, and other important partners.
1) Assess current major monitoring programs in the South Atlantic LCC footprint that conduct fire effects monitoring and summarize each program based on the types of data collected and program goals.2) Compare existing monitoring programs to current rapid assessment condition metric protocols for open pine to determine opportunities for merging efforts into a single protocol (for data collection purposes).3) Collect data using draft protocol, with a focus on filling geographic and conceptual gaps in our knowledge (at least two different locations within the South Atlantic LCC)4) Develop process for using existing wildlife and vegetation data to quantify extent to which draft metrics scores match up with rapid assessment condition metrics as well as South Atlantic indicator predictions from the Conservation Blueprint and suggest changes to metrics, weighting schemes, and indicator predictions based on results.5) Issue final report that summarizes suggested protocols for fire effects monitoring and develop and release accompanying ECO OBS database that partners can use to enter data and calculate condition scores for their study areas.
Lead Organization: NatureServeKey Collaborators: USFWS, Florida Natural Areas Inventory, Jones Center, North Carolina TNC, US Forest Service
Project 2. Improved tracking of the spatial extent of prescribed fire
Despite improvements by many organizations in tracking the spatial extent of prescribed fire, many prescribed fires in the South Atlantic are only depicted as a single point. Furthermore, land management agencies differ in the types of data and names of data fields for data collected, thereby making it more difficult to combine data into a single database. Integrated digitized polygons for the region, not just points and acreage by land manager, are critical for predicting ecological impacts over specific areas and understanding how each area interacts with other adjacent areas (that may or may not be under similar ownership). Our team proposes to assist in consolidating spatial extent information on prescribed fire throughout the South Atlantic LCC footprint (with a particular emphasis on open pine habitat) and increasing the number of prescribed fire treatments available as digitized polygons.
1) Identify existing databases that might serve to house data across all of the South Atlantic LCC and work within each state to determine main data holders of spatial data on prescribed burns and collect data model for each database.2) Determine strategy for consolidating multiple types of prescribed fire spatial data into one database including crosswalks between central data model and individual key data holders. Examine and address concerns of key stakeholders regarding uses and misuses of global database.3) Develop final database or customize existing database identified from task 1.4) Develop plan/proposal for seamless way for partners to share and upload data in future years and find sources of funding to support this (phase II) to make it easier to update in the future (web portal?)
Lead Organization: NatureServeKey Collaborators: Florida Natural Areas Inventory, Georgia Natural Heritage Program, Virginia Natural Heritage Program, North Carolina TNC, South Carolina TNC, US Forest Service, USFWS Refuge System
