LANDFIRE 2001 and 2008 Refresh Geographic Area Report--Pacific Southwest

The LANDFIRE National project (LF_1.0.0) was successfully completed in 2009. The goal of LANDFIRE National was to generate consistent 2001 vintage 30 meter spatial data sets for all 50 states for fire and other natural resource applications. This report highlights results from the continuation of LANDFIRE as a program to update the spatial data layers through 2008. The focus of this phase of the program was to improve the data products and account for vegetation change across the landscape caused by wildland fire, fuel and vegetation treatments, and (or) management. In addition, changes caused by insects and disease, storms, invasive plants, and other natural or anthropogenic events were incorporated when appropriate data were available. This report describes the LANDFIRE 2001/2008 Refresh effort to update existing map layers to reflect more current conditions, focusing primarily on vegetation changes. The effort incorporated user feedback and new data, producing two comprehensive Refresh data product sets:

1. LANDFIRE 2001 Refresh (LF_1.0.5) enhanced LANDFIRE map layers by incorporating user feedback and additional data to provide a foundation to update data to 2008. It was also designed to provide users with a data set to help facilitate comparisons between 2001 and 2008 (i.e. Refresh LF_1.1.0) data sets.

2. LANDFIRE 2008 Refresh (LF_1.1.0) updated map layers to reflect vegetation changes and disturbances that occurred between 1999 and 2008.

In this report, we (1) address the background and provide details pertaining to why there are two Refresh data sets, (2) explain the requirements, planning, and procedures behind the completion and delivery of the updated products for each of the data product sets, (3) show and describe results, and (4) provide case studies illustrating the performance of LANDFIRE National, LANDFIRE 2001 Refresh and LANDFIRE 2008 Refresh (LF_1.1.0) data products on some example wildland fires.