What happens when an Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and its National Park Service or Bureau of Land Management neighbors have different classification maps for vegetation or fuel models?  When wildland fire is involved it creates considerable confusion!  

Until LANDFIRE is completed in 2009, landcover/vegetation maps will continue to vary between land units in Alaska.  Most classification maps use coarse classes such as “Closed Spruce – Deciduous” while others are more specific “Closed Spruce-Balsam Poplar,” but all are tiered from the Alaska Vegetation Classification System (Viereck et al. 1992.)  When each unit creates its own fire fuels map from these vegetation classes, it can mean that an incident command team managing a fire across borders will find modeled fire behavior rapidly changing as the simulated fire hits an agency boundary.  Alaskan fire managers already use the Canadian fuel models, as well as the 13 National fuel behavior models. With 40 new fuel models now available from Scott and Bergen the chance for mixed classification increases.  Three members of the Fish and Wildlife Service fire management program recently worked with interagency partners, and J. Scott, to develop a crosswalk from the Alaska Vegetation Classification system to each of the 3 fuel model systems.  The result is a common vegetation-fuels crosswalk endorsed by the interagency Alaska Wildland Fire Coordinating Group.  The crosswalk which is posted under the Research, Fuels and GIS committees at http://fire.ak.blm.gov/administration/awfcg_committees.php should help reduce confusion as fire managers use the new fuel models.  A companion guidebook to the fuel models is expected this spring.