Fire Ecology Annual Report: Calendar Year 2008 [Northern Great Plains]

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A summary of fire ecology activities and program information for the Park/network including fire effects plot workload, staffing, management objectives and monitoring results, and planning, fire monitoring, communications, and research. Also included are staff accomplishments/areas of focus, future program direction and other optional information (e.g. data analysis graphics or presentations, annual highlights, publications, program challenges, unique solutions to problems, collaboration, photographs of monitoring/fire activities, and suggestions on FFI). The Northern Great Plains fire Ecology Program reached a milestone in 2008 with 11 monitoring plots measured at 10 years post fire. Cody Wienk has been documenting the program through a 10 year program review summarizing and analyzing data by monitoring type at the burn unit, park, and region level. Dan Swanson continued working on this project after his arrival in August. This document is expected to be finished in the spring of 2009. We continued a project working with the BLM assessing some of their lands for fire ecology related information to be used in their general management plan. That included site assessments in grassland and forest settings and forest and fuel plots in Black Hills ponderosa pine sites. We presented this information at the’88 Fires: Yellowstone and Beyond Conference in September. We had some personnel changes in 2008 with Dan Swanson arriving as the Fire Ecologist for the park group. Dan had served as the Ozark Highlands park ecologist. Jon Freeman also arrived to take the Assistant Fire Monitor position. Jon comes from Colorado Sate University and the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis program. Four prescribed fires occurred during the year with two at Theodore Roosevelt and one each at Jewel Cave and Wind Cave. The smaller than normal number of prescribed fires is due to personnel changes in key positions, a Prescribed Fire Specialist at Wind Cave and Fire Management Officer for the North Dakota parks. We continued working in a new database called FFI (FEAT/Firemon/Integrated). Our data from the previous software, FEAT, was converted into the new format this spring. All of the 2008 field data was entered into the new software and data-checked as a result of many days of committed work from Marcus Lund. Work also continued on our spatial data and we now have complete layers for all of our fire monitoring plots in the ten parks within our group. The process of assimilating the layers for prescribed fire perimeters continues.

Fire Ecology Annual Report: Calendar Year 2008 [Northern Great Plains]

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