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National Assessment

The LANDFIRE team understands the importance of determining and communicating to users the characteristics of project products. To accomplish this end, LANDFIRE leadership established the Product Quality Working Team (PQWT). The PQWT is composed of LANDFIRE production team members and external experts.

A Product Quality Control and Assessment (PQCA) Plan was developed by the PQWT and accepted by the LANDFIRE Leadership Team and LANDFIRE Executive Oversight Committee. The plan includes quality control procedures for production processes as well as a product quality assessment approach where applicable. For details of the assessment approach, please download and review the PQCA Plan currently posted for the Western U.S. Milestone.

In short, the LANDFIRE products quantitatively assessed under the PQCA Plan are those that are modeled directly from geo-referenced field plots contained in the LANDFIRE Reference Data Base (LFRDB). This includes the Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) and Environmental Site Potential (ESP) products for the Western U.S. Milestone. For the Eastern U.S. Milestone, only the EVT layer is assessed, due to changes in ESP mapping methods. Canopy Fuels and Fire Behavior Fuel Model (FBFM) spatial products are also assessed under the PQCA plan, although with different methods than those used for EVT. Complete results from the product quality assessment process are available below for the Western U.S. Milestone, and will be made available for the Eastern U.S. Milestone as soon as they are completed.

Many of the product quality assessment results are presented by Super Zones, which are aggregations of individual LANDFIRE mapping zones. Super Zones represent areas with large enough sample sizes to enable meaningful inferences about product quality, given the sampling design used to withhold field plots for product quality assessment. See the PQCA Plan and the Western Milestone Agreement Assessment Super Zone Analysis for more detail on the holdout sample design and the use of super zones in the product quality assessment process.

For the western U.S. mapping zones, results are summarized in two reports:

• The LANDFIRE National Western Milestone Agreement Assessment Summary presents the overall agreement for the West at a summary level by super zone.
  
  
• The LANDFIRE National Western Milestone Agreement Assessment Super Zone Analysis presents more detailed information about agreement for specific mapped classes within individual super zones in the West.

Click in the map below to download full class-specific contingency tables for a particular area in the West. Eastern map zone information will be available in spring 2009.