Forest fuel treatments are commonly applied in the wildland urban interface to mitigate wildfire and reduce the potential for catastrophic loss of values. Wildfire encounters with fuel treatments occur frequently but documentation of these events is limited and inconsistent.

Documentation of changes in fire behaviour as a wildfire challenges a fuel treatment is essential to evaluating the effectiveness these treatments.

Fuels managers across Canada have initiated a data management system that will store data collected from wildfire encounters with fuel treatments. The recently developed National Fuels Management Reference Database will provide the foundation for data collection methods. The next challenge will be to populate this database with data collected from observations using standardized documentation techniques of wildfire encounters with fuel treatments.

Fuels managers would like to develop data collection processes that can be used by a larger population of first responders and/or forestry personnel who may not have extensive fire behaviour experience or training in fire behaviour data collection.

This project will develop data collection methods that can be rapidly conducted as a wildfire approaches and engages a fuel treatment.