Decision Support

Climate change, forests, fire, water, and fish: building resilient landscapes, streams, and managers

This report describes the framework of how fire and climate change work together to affect forest and fish communities. Learning how to adapt will come from testing, probing, and pushing that framework and then proposing new ideas. The western U.S. defies generalizations, and much learning must necessarily be local in implication. This report serves as a scaffold for that learning. It comprises three primary chapters on physical processes, biological interactions, and management decisions, accompanied by a special section with separately authored papers addressing interactions of fish populations with wildfire.

NEPAssist Tool

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NEPAssist is a tool that facilitates the environmental review process and project planning in relation to environmental considerations. The web-based application draws environmental data dynamically from EPA Geographic Information System databases and web services and provides immediate screening of environmental assessment indicators for a user-defined area of interest. These features contribute to a streamlined review process that potentially raises important environmental issues at the earliest stages of project development.

Nevada Integrated Climate and Evapotranspiration Network (NICE Net)

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NICE Net is a weather station network measuring weather variables to assess climate and reference evapotranspiration across the state of Nevada. The focus of the NICE Net is to measure and provide climate data that are derived from agricultural areas of Nevada for estimating irrigation water requirements.

Smoke models and their emissions-related uncertanties

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Three models were evaluated in this study: CALPUFF, DAYSMOKE and CMAQ during different prescribed burn and wildfire episodes occurring throughout the southeastern US. Results suggested that CALPUFF could not be determined to be a suitable model for simulating the air quality impacts of fires. Model evaluation indicated that DAYSMOKE can be turned into a reliable a short‐range smoke‐impact prediction tool for land managers. On a regional scale, PM2.5 impacts of prescribed burns and wildfires are best predicted by air quality models such as CMAQ.