A lot of planning goes into a prescribed fire long before the first drip torch is lit.
To safely apply this vital ecosystem tool, burn practitioners must first know what detailed parameters are best suited for each burn unit to achieve their goals while also being a good neighbor to others in the area and maintaining air quality.
The Southern Group of State Foresters Prescribed Burn Planner can help. Tall Timbers will now manage the site and, through a grant from the U.S. Forest Service, is setting forth to include some additional improvements to the online tool.
The burn planner can help fire practitioners set their ideal weather, wind and other conditions for specified burn units and receive regular notifications whether their fire prescription is suitable.
“It’s a unique tool for all types of burners,” said Tall Timbers Smoke Science Program Director Holly Nowell.
Nowell and Interim Geospatial Program Director Karen Cummins are working with the help of new grant funding and the Timmons Group, to add in some improvements to the burn planner that should aid in accessibility and incorporate more tools that will benefit not only burners, but the people who live and work near where prescribed fire is prevalent.
Those include smoke planning and modeling, mobile accessibility, completed burn tracking, integration with the National Association of State Foresters (NASF) National Fuels Treatment Tracking (NFT) databases, enhanced weather parameters and more.
Nowell, who was hired to lead Tall Timbers’ new Smoke Science program last year following the setting of new federal air quality standards, said the hope is to incorporate a way for burners to better plan for smoke emissions. “In light of new EPA air quality regulations, more and more people are becoming aware of smoke and smoke implications, so it’s great to have this tool,” Nowell said.
Another concern is to keep the Prescribed Burn Planner current. “If things don’t have a constant source of funding, they tend to not always be successful, right? They lose functionality. Glitches happen, and it’s not a useful tool anymore. It’s important to keep finding funding to help this tool grow and expand it,.” Nowell added.
Currently the burn planner has 240 registered users.
Over the next few months, Tall Timbers hopes to solicit input from burners about next steps, desired functionality and test changes through a set of users to evaluate how useful improvements to the burn planner are.
“There is potential to include data about assessing fire in different vegetation types, help with writing burn plans and plotting units and assisting in reintroducing fire in more volatile regions like the West using the burn planner,” Cummins said.
“We’re trying to meet this immediate need of looking at air quality and smoke modeling,” Cummins continued. “But there’s so many directions we could go. It’s great that people have all these ideas on ways to improve this.”
Want to create an account on the Burn Planner? Follow this link
