Maybe. If you are engaged in research or fire and land management activities that require vegetation, fuel or fire regime information, LANDFIRE may be for you. LANDFIRE is an ongoing national program that is producing continuous vegetation-and fire- related spatial data and ecological models for the entire United States. That’s wall-to-wall data for all 50 states, served for free on the LANDFIRE Data Distribution site and through the LANDFIRE Data Access Tool. If you already have high-quality, up-to-date spatial data and ecological models for all the variables you want across your area of interest, LANDFIRE is probably not for you. Most folks are not so lucky, finding that they have no data, old data, are missing, read on.
This is the first of four introductory blogs in a series written by LANDFIRE ecologist Kori Blankenship for the Joint Fire Science Program blog online at firescience.gov. Kori offers a checklist to consider, for incident managers, fuel planners, CWPP participants, wildland fire managers, and more.