2024 SAG Award Winners

United States Forest Service

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Project Goal

Fuels Treatment Effectiveness Monitoring (FTEM) is the process Federal Land Management agencies in the United States use to assess how vegetation management--work like thinning, prescribed fire, and tree harvest--helps us mitigate for the unwanted effects of wildfires. Many of our treatments are designed to reduce or rearrange fuels to change the intensity, severity, or effects of a potential wildfire. These are done to make it safer to protect homes and communities as well as to preserve watershed and ecosystem health.
We visit past treatments after a wildfire with the goal of improving future efforts. This is a key part of adaptively managing. Lessons learned help our responders use these treatments to control fires and help our programs improve how we manage national forests in Oregon and Washington.
More information on living with and preparing for wildfires can be found online in the National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy, Wildfire Risk To Communities, and on Ready.
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Business Problem Solved

The increasing pace and scale of wildfires over the last decade presents a number of challenges. During fires, managers are often short of needed response resources. After fires, resources are taxed with a number of post-fire recovery activities to protect neighboring communities and our forests from additional damage. The work we do to treat vegetation before fires can help with both response and to improve outcomes from the fire.

Using GIS to create a data collection system that is tied to the National Incident Feature Service, where fuels treatment data can be displayed during wildfire response, was a way to share this information with fire response teams, or Incident Management Teams, to help them strategically locate firelines where we had done treatments. It also helped us improve data collection as the fires wound down. And as you can see in our public facing dashboards, it enabled us to widely share lessons learned both with our communities of practice and the public.

Technology Implemented

ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Collector, ArcGIS Experience Builder, ArcGIS Dashboards, ArcGIS Pro

Development Team Biography

Dana Skelly, Wildfire Risk Reduction Program Manager and project lead

Jason McGovern, Fuels Coordinator
Alexis Holder, GIS Analyst and Data Steward
Jonna Dushey, GIS Analyst
Autumn Mason, GIS Analyst
Desraye Assali, GIS Analyst
Rebecca Naeko Webber, GIS Analyst
Sydney Iverson, GIS Analyst
Erica Zacek, Crew Supervisor and Data Steward
Galice Wildland Fire Module and the R6 WFM Community