28th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, February 21-23, 2003
Abstracts

POSTER

Fire Hazard Mapping at the Mojave National Preserve

M. Brooks¹, J. R. Matchett1, T. Esque¹, and C. Wallace^2
1U.S. Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, Las Vegas Field Station 160 N. Stephanie St., Henderson, NV 89014
²U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Geographic Science Team, Tucson, AZ

Region-wide characterization of vegetation and fuels can be useful for fire managers at both a strategical planning level (for example defining locations to place permanent fire-suppression resources) and at operational and tactical levels (for example knowing were areas of potentially high fire hazard exist during an actual wildfire). Relatively fine-resolution vegetation maps for regions in the Mojave Desert have recently been developed, which can now be combined with other spatial data to define areas of high wildfire hazard. In this poster we describe this process for a fire hazard map we developed for the Mojave National Preserve.

We first classified vegetation cover types into high, medium, and low categories for fire spread rate and fireline intensity. This classification was further refined into 6 categories using BEHAVE, a fire behavior modeling program, to develop slope-adjusted fire spread rates and intensities based upon standard fuel models. These sloped-adjusted categories were then applied across the Mojave National Preserve using a vegetation map and DEM-derived slope map. We also developed an annual lightning strike density map based up lighting data collected by the Bureau of Land Management from 1989-1995. A composite fire hazard map for the Preserve was created by combining fire spread rate, fireline intensity, and lightning strike density layers. This process provides a starting point, which can be further refined, for future region-wide analyses of fire hazards in the Mojave Desert.