This project was based on a National Fire Plan-funded project and supported by the Joint Fire Sciences Program (Miller, 2013). The goals of FIRESEV are to understand where and why fires burn severely and to give fire managers, fire ecologists, and natural resource managers tools to assess severity before, during, and after a wildfire. In the beginning, FIRESEV only covered the western United States due to the availability of data, this has expanded to the eastern United States but has required the use of different data that is not as reliable. FIRESEV has a wide range of tools with several fire management applications, including real-time forecasts and assessments in wildfire situations. There are also tools for planning after a fire, such as rehabilitation and long-term planning for future fire hot spots (Miller, 2013). FIRESEV is built from several aspects of the western United States such as the type of vegetation, the amount of growth, the topography, and climate. This mathematical model is very beneficial for several sectors; fire departments can use FIRESEV in an active fire season to gauge and track current fires as well as identify high-risk areas that will need more attention. Community leadership can use predictive information to target budgets to minimize high-risk areas.

BehavePlus

BehavePlus is a program that describes wildland fire behavior and effects and the fire environment (Andrews, 2010). Much like FIRESEV this program can be used to project the behavior of an ongoing fire, planning prescribed fire, assessing fuel hazard, and training. The BEHAVE program was combined with fuel modeling programs and updated to become the BehavePlus program in 2001. This program is open access and available to everyone with a computer, it is most beneficial to those in firefighting. The programming requires a knowledgeable user due to the predictive nature of the program. One must understand how fire behaves in order to correctly understand the data outputs.

Questions:

What comment can you make about those two Mathematical Modeling and the Fire and Emergency Services?