Consume Tutorial

Susan Prichard

Informations

• Publié par: Musor
• Nombre de lectures: 22
• Langue: English

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FCCS Tutorial

INSTRUCTOR’S GUIDE

To download and/or view the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS)

tutorial, please visit:

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/products/tutorials/

Tutorial: The FCCS tutorial is intended to be viewed individually by students either

online, or downloaded to a personal computer and viewed offline. You may wish to

incorporate the tutorial as a pre-course assignment or classroom exercise.

Student Workbook: The workbook contains an introduction to the FCCS followed by

“screen captures” of each page of the tutorial, with space provided for student

notes.

Demonstration: A basic Microsoft PowerPoint® presentation with screen-by-screen

instructions on how to use the FCCS is also available for downloading.

To

effectively use this presentation, you will need to fully understand how to use the

program by reviewing the FCCS tutorial and by using the FCCS to become familiar

with its many applications.

If you choose to use the presentation, you may wish to

tailor it with examples applicable to your region.

User Guide: The FCCS User’s Guide is also available to you for your reference.

A note on installing the FCCS:

FCCS software and installation instructions can be found at:

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/fccs/downloads.html

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. 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 classroom exercise.

Land Management Tool Training Package – FCCS Instructor’s Guide

page 1 of 5

INTRODUCTION TO THE 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.

Land Management Tool Training Package – FCCS Instructor’s Guide

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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

(http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/fccs/).

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

Land Management Tool Training Package – FCCS Instructor’s Guide

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR INSTALLING FCCS SOFTWARE

Downloading and Installing FCCS Software

1.

Download FCCS version

1.0 (1.71 200601091330) fccs.zip from

http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/fccs/

2.

Save this file on your c:\ drive, and unzip and extract 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 extracted 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

The 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.

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 http://www.java.com

4.

Click on the Java Software Download button.

Land Management Tool Training Package – FCCS Instructor’s Guide

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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

Verifying the FCCS installation

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 email message to help support diagnose the problem.

For further information about the FCCS download, contact:

Ellen Eberhardt, Technical Information Specialist

[phone]

[e-mail]

Land Management Tool Training Package

Fire and Environmental Applications Team

USFS - PNW Research Station

Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory

400 North 34th Street, Suite 201

Seattle, Washington

98103

Land Management Tool Training Package – FCCS Instructor’s Guide

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