Accurate, complete fuels data are critical for making fuel management decisions and for predicting fire behavior and fire effects. A fuel photo series is a useful reference that allows natural resource managers to quickly quantify fuel and vegetation properties by comparing on site conditions to a series of photos showing a range of calculated fuel loads within a similar vegetative community. While there are photo series available for a wide range of ecosystem types nationwide, this type of information is lacking for natural and mechanically treated chaparral. The most likely reason for this information gap is the difficulty in collecting and photographing fuels in these dense fuel types.
The attached PDF document is a series of 55 photographs that display a range of fuel loadings across mechanically masticated and crushed chaparral in the Southwestern United States. The photos in this series were compiled from a number of mechanical treatments that were implemented on the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino national forests of southern California between 2004 and 2010. Treatments range in age from 1-8 years and represent chaparral stands dominated by both mixed and individual species.
The attached CSV files contain the data used for this photo series. The first, Treatment_Sites, contains UTM Eastings and Northings and a Site ID, along with other site characteristics. The other three csv files (Fuels, Plant cover data and Species list), relate to the Sites using the Site ID in a 1 to 1, or a 1 to many relationship. A user could reconstruct a relational database using the primary key or build an ESRI Geodatabase with a point feature class and related tables." See attached XML metadata for more information.
