ESRD’s Wildland Fuels Inventory Program was established in 2006 and collects fuel load information from fuel treatment sites throughout Alberta. Crews establish monitoring plots to quantify pre-burn and pre-treatment fuel load and vegetation composition, immediate post-burn and post-treatment effects, and long-term vegetative response.

All this information was stored in a provincial database that was meant to be used as a decision-support tool for prescribed burn planning. However within that database, relationships between data tables were not defined and data integrity was compromised. The database, as it was originally designed, could not prevent duplicate entries and other data-entry errors, making any subsequent calculations and analyses suspect.

FPInnovations analyzed the current database and the data collection methods to build the next generation database.