Development and Demonstration of Smoke Plume, Fire Emissions, and Pre- and Post-Prescribed Fire Fuel Models on North Carolina Coastal Plain Forest Ecosystems

Project Problem Statement

The Fire Management Plan for Alligator River and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuges identifies smoke management as the number one issue influencing fire management, and my District Fire Management Officer assures me that smoke management is the number one issue for the entire Coastal Plain of the southeastern U.S. To be effective and adaptive land managers, we need real-time fire management tools for prescribed burning to quantify fuel biomass and resulting emissions and to forecast the extent and direction of smoke plumes in Coastal Plain ecosystems. The increased fuel loading in the wake of Hurricane Isabel in October 2003 only emphasizes the urgent need for this information.

Discussions between my fellow refuge managers and fire management staff in eastern North Carolina, and from elsewhere within the southeastern and Mid-Atlantic coastal plain, have identified the critical need to determine pre- and post-fire fuel loading, area burned, and fuel consumption in order to assess smoke management on prescribed burns. This data must be available in a useable form for fire management officers, incident command teams on wildfires, air regulatory agencies, smoke management forecasters, and others. Specifically, we need to support research, development, application, and refinement of fuel loading, fuel consumption, emission production models, and smoke plume models.

Well-developed protocols for wildland fuel and burned area monitoring at the individual prescribed burn level, as well as landscape and regional scales, are essential for effectively allocating limited resources on refuges and other properties. These tools are needed for land managers to balance the many, often conflicting, policy mandates for managing threatened and endangered species and other wildlife, reducing hazardous fuel loads to protect the wildland/urban interface, and ensuring the public's health and safety in surrounding communities. These protocols are also essential for continued cooperation and data sharing between agencies like the North Carolina Division of Forest Resources and U.S. Air Force and surrounding landowners like The Nature Conservancy and North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission.

The proposed study will directly provide Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and the U.S. Air Force Dare County Bomb Range a toolkit for integrating fuel loading, fire emissions, and smoke plume measurements and modeling into our fire management programs. Inventorying, mapping, and modeling down woody debris and fuels biomass and developing fuel loading formulas will greatly improve our current understanding of community risk in the wildland/urban interface and improve our response to unexpected increases in fuel loads provided by hurricanes. Validating the PB-Coastal Plain and BlueSky smoke models will ensure a dependable, accurate smoke model for the continued improvement and refinement of our prescribed burning program. Characterizing trace gas and particulate emissions from prescribed burns will allow us to dialog with the State of North Carolina on air quality issues, especially the modification of state smoke management guidelines to allow for more landscape level burns. Most importantly, the tech transfer built into the proposal will allow for web-based decision support tools, real-time fire emissions and smoke plume modeling, and the training to understand and effectively use the research.

I am the Agency Administrator responsible for the Alligator River and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuges, and I am committed to supporting the proposed work with the resources available on the field station as disclosed in the accompanying proposal.