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Standardized Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation
Monitoring Protocols
Project Description
Fire
rehabilitation programs have existed within federal
agencies since the early 1960s. The U.S. Forest
Service and Bureau of Land Management are the largest users
of emergency stabilization and rehabilitation (ES&R) funds,
but these agencies only sporadically implement proposed
monitoring and rarely use common protocols (Government
Accountability Office (GAO) 2003).
As a result, it is impossible to
draw scientifically credible conclusions regarding the
effectiveness of ES&R projects. Additionally, the data
that does exist are
stored in field office files and are often not available for
other managers to use when planning new ES&R treatments.
This
objectives of this project are to facilitate analysis of
ES&R projects by proposing data collection
procedures that are comparable between projects on a
regional scale by:
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Investigating
a common approach and methodology to assess the
effectiveness of ES&R projects region-wide.
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Using field based
computers to enter data in a standard format that can be
uploaded to a central BLM database.
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Analyze collected
data at regular intervals to determine overall success
and to identify factors involved in successful
treatments.
A common monitoring strategy would help address GAO
concerns by monitoring multiple projects with comparable
methods, consistently documenting results and enabling
the creation and maintenance of a central database for query and reporting,
and ultimately determining the effectiveness of
post-fire rehabilitation activities region-wide.
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