Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The U.S. Geological Survey Southwest Biological Science Center is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU Partner for research aimed at assessing how DOI long-term monitoring data and new monitoring methods can be used to build scalable fuel models to assess wildfire risk, treatment effectiveness, and scenario-casting of alternative management actions. Wildfires can spread indiscriminately across Department of the Interior (DOI) and adjacent lands in the western U.S., making it vital to protect human infrastructure and natural resource values at risk. An essential step to mitigate wildfire risk is to assess and monitor the types, amounts, and distributions of fuel across DOI lands. While several approaches exist for monitoring fuel loads in forest ecosystems, fuel assessments are less common in non-forest ecosystems where a majority of DOI lands reside. The goal of this funding opportunity is to examine the capabilities of new and existing field- and remote sensing-based data sources, databases, and tools to provide accessible fuel products for DOI decision-making and planning.