FCCS Tutorial INSTRUCTOR S GUIDE

Transcription

1 FCCS Tutorial INSTRUCTOR S GUIDE To download and/or view the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) tutorial, please visit the tutorial webpage at: The FCCS tutorial is intended to be viewed individually by students online or downloaded to a personal computer and viewed offline. You may wish to incorporate the tutorial as a pre-course assignment or inclass exercise. A student workbook is available on the FCCS tutorial webpage; the workbook contains an introduction to FCCS followed by each page of the tutorial with space provided for student notes. A basic Microsoft PowerPoint presentation with screen-by-screen instructions on how to use FCCS is also available for downloading. To effectively use the presentation, you will need to fully understand how to use the program by reviewing the FCCS tutorial and by using FCCS to become familiar with it. The FCCS User s Guide is also available to you for your reference. If you choose to use the presentation, you may wish to tailor it with examples applicable to your region. A note on installing Consume 3.0: Installation instructions are provided in this Instructor s Guide and on the FCCS webpage: FCCS was programmed in Java and can run in a variety of operating systems. To run the program, you may need to update the version of Java Virtual Machine on your computer. Your students must have administrative privileges on their computers to install FCCS.

2 If you plan to use FCCS in a computer lab or workshop in which students bring their personal laptops, make sure that every computer has the program fully installed prior to the beginning of your in-class exercise.

3 INTRODUCTION TO FCCS Development of spatial fuelbed property layers is one of the most important tasks required to operate fuel and fire management decision support systems and dynamic vegetation models. Knowledge of wildland fuelbed characteristics has always been important to fire managers, and is becoming increasingly important to ecologists, air quality managers, and carbon balance modelers. As the source of all fire behavior and fire effects, fuelbeds must be characterized and mapped before any calculation of fire potential can be made. Fuel mapping, hazard assessment, evaluation of fuel treatment options and sequences, and monitoring fire effects all require a consistent and scientifically applied fuel characteristic classification system. It is prohibitively difficult to inventory all fuelbed characteristics every time it is necessary to predict events or to make management decisions. Fuelbeds are structurally complex; they vary widely in their physical attributes, potential fire behavior and effects, and in the options they present for fire control and use. Variation in fuelbed characteristics is not random or chaotic but is the expression of ecological processes working over time, of natural disturbance events, and of human manipulation. The Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS), released in August 2005, was designed to provide fuel managers with a nationally consistent and durable system to characterize and classify fuelbeds and to provide numerical inputs to fire behavior, fire effects, and dynamic vegetation models. Using FCCS The FCCS offers a set of fuelbeds, representing various fuel environments throughout the United States, that were compiled from published and unpublished literature, fuels photo series, fuels data sets, and expert opinion. The system enables modification and enhancement of these fuelbeds to represent a particular scale of interest. The FCCS then reports assigned and calculated fuel characteristics for each existing fuelbed stratum including the canopy, shrubs, nonwoody, woody, litter/lichen/moss, and ground fuels (i.e., duff) and fuel categories within each stratum. Finally, the system classifies each fuelbed by calculating fire potentials that provide an index (0-9) of the intrinsic capacity of each fuelbed for surface fire behavior, crown fire, and available consumption of fuels. Applications The FCCS outputs are being used in a national wildland fire emissions inventory and in the development of fuelbed, fire hazard, and treatment effectiveness maps on several national forests. Although the FCCS was built for the United States, the conceptual framework is applicable worldwide.

4 FCCS facilitates the mapping of fuelbed characteristics and fire hazard assessments by providing fuelbeds, fuelbed characteristics, and predicted surface fire behavior, crown fire, and available fuel potentials. It also provides the necessary inputs to run current fuel consumption and emission production models, such as Consume 3.0 and the Fire Emissions Production Simulator (FEPS), which in turn, provide regional and national smoke inventories for wildland fires. The system is currently being showcased as a tool to map fuelbeds and fire hazard, enabling managers to maximize fuel treatment effectiveness on the Okanogan and Wenatchee National Forests, and on the Deschutes National Forest. FERA is also demonstrating the use of the FCCS as a basis for a national air pollutant and carbon emission inventory, in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The FCCS software is available for download from the FERA website ( For more information, contact: Roger Ottmar, Research Forester Fire and Environmental Applications Team USFS - PNW Research Station Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory 400 North 34th Street, Suite 201 Seattle, Washington 98103

5 Instructions for Installing the FCCS Software Download and Install FCCS Software 1. Download FCCS version 1.0 ( ) fccs.zip from 2. Save this file on your c:\ drive, and unzip it. It will automatically be installed into a directory that it sets up, called c:\fccs. You may also save it to a directory of your choice, but be sure to remember where you saved it. 3. After verifying that you have Java installed (see below), open the FCCS by double-clicking on fccs.jar located in the directory where you unzipped the FCCS program. Be patient; allow at least 15 seconds for it to open! 4. You may wish to create your own shortcut of FCCS to the computer desktop for easier access. CAUTION! If you reinstall or update FCCS, and you have any customized fuelbeds in the...\fccs\conf\fuelbeds\user_fuelbeds directory, copy them to a location outside the FCCS before reinstallng the program. Otherwise, your customized fuelbeds will be automatically deleted. Verify that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is current. FCCS requires the JVM version 1.5 or later (maybe referred to as version 5.0). To verify that your machine has a reasonably current version, open a command line window (MS-Windows users: this means go to Start/Run and type in cmd.exe) and type: 1. java -version 2. If you get a message that 'java' is not recognized..., it means that java is not installed or can not be found in your %PATH%. 3. If java is ok, you should see something like: java version "1.5.0_02" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_02-b09) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_02-b09, mixed mode, sharing) Any version 1.5 or more recent is acceptable. How to install Java 1.5 (often referred to as 5.0 on the website) if you do not have it. 1. Obtain administrative privileges for this install.

6 2. Verify you have admin privileges by clicking the time on the tool bar in the lower right corner of your screen. It should put up a dialog to change the clock or give you an error message 3. Got to 4. Click on the Java Software Download button. 5. It will ask that you accept the "Terms of Use" - Click continue. 6. Once the installation is complete, follow the steps above for verification How to install the FCCS These instructions assume that you have access to the web while performing the installation. It is not necessary to have access to the web to actually run FCCS. Most of the work will be done from the command line, so you should have a command line window open in whatever environment you are working in. See section on Verify that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is current section above for help with the command line window. Verifying the FCCS installation Unzip the file into a directory. You will want to navigate into that directory in which you installed FCCS and then give the command fccs This will run the fccs.bat file which runs the application. You should see the Fuel Characteristics Classification System v 1.0 splash screen come up in a moment. If something goes wrong, you will see a number of error messages, which you will want to copy to an message to help support diagnose the problem.