Fuel & Fire Tools (FFT) Online is the latest version of the USFS PNW Research Station Fire and Environmental Research Applications (FERA) Team’s fuels assessment and burn prediction software, integrating the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) and Consume into a single online interface. The web application replaces the Fuel & Fire Tools (FFT) Windows program, and is meant to solve issues associated with software installation and allow for more agile integration of updates. FCCS stores and classifies fuels data as fuelbeds and calculates fuel loadings, carbon, and other summary characteristics. At its heart, it is a Java program that takes XML files (fuelbeds) as input. Consume predicts burn outcomes for given fuelbeds, estimating total fuel consumption, pollutant emissions, and heat release. At its heart, it is a python program that takes a CSV file (fuelbed loadings) as input.
Fuelbeds are the common currency in FFT, which require a list of one to many fuelbeds to run calculations. A fuelbed is an FCCS data structure that encapsulates a given forest, shrubland, or grassland’s fuels data in an XML file and serves as input to the FCCS calculator, which generates fuel loadings, carbon, and other summary fuel characteristics for each fuelbed. FCCS also predicts surface fire behavior and 0-9 indexes for surface fire, crown fire, and available fuel potentials for a given environmental scenario. The fuel loadings generated by FCCS then serve as inputs for Consume, which predicts total fuel consumption, pollutant emissions, and heat release for fuelbeds under specified fuel moisture and other environmental conditions. Both FCCS and Consume were developed as open-source software and are available as command-line executables and modules in the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS). Consume is also incorporated as a module within the USFS AirFire's BlueSky Playground and Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI)’s Wildland Fire Emissions Inventory System (WFEIS).