# Frequently Asked Questions

1.  **Why must we monitor fuels treatments?**

> First, it's the law. The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and the
> Federal Land Planning and Management Act (FLPMA) both include
> requirements to monitor whether programs are meeting the land
> management objectives established under the applicable land use plan.
> Section 102(g)(8) of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (PL 108-148)
> specifically requires a 5-year monitoring report that discusses trends
> in fire regime condition class and whether treatments authorized under
> the Act are meeting project objectives.
>
> Second, it's in our regulations. The planning regulations for both
> agencies (FSM 1920 and FSH 1909, BLM -- H-1600-1, Chapter V) require
> monitoring and evaluation to support the adaptive management process
> and to determine whether on-the-ground activities are maintaining or
> moving towards desired conditions and objectives within applicable
> land use plans. FSM 5141.1(5) requires an appropriate level of
> monitoring and evaluation to determine if the fire use program
> (planned and unplanned ignitions) is having the desired effect. FSM
> 5142.2 incorporates by reference the burn plan standards established
> in the 1998 Implementation Guide. These standards include a post-burn
> evaluation to enable resource managers and the agency administrator to
> determine if project objectives were met, including documentation of
> burn day weather, fire behavior, smoke dispersal, and first order fire
> effects. The Bureau of Land Management's handbook H-9214-1, Chapter 3
> A(15) requires a monitoring plan for prescribed fires that includes
> provisions to monitor burn day weather, fire behavior, and whether
> fire treatment objectives have been met.
>
> Third, it's part of the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. Item
> 17 of the current policy requires a systematic method of evaluation to
> determine whether projects effectively implement the various elements
> of the policy, which includes use of fire and other fuel treatments
> intended to protect resources from unwanted fire and to meet
> ecological, social, and economic components of land use plans.
>
> Lastly, monitoring is an essential element of adaptive management. We
> cannot learn which treatments and prescriptions work and which ones do
> not and make adjustments unless we have a systematic monitoring
> strategy in place to support such learning. A systematic program will
> also support land use and project planning efforts and build the
> necessary site-specific data needed for future project analyses under
> the provisions of NEPA. A systematic monitoring program can also aid
> in building public trust.

2.  **What are the minimum requirements to meet these laws and
    regulations?**

> The minimum requirement to meet the monitoring requirements for
> program effectiveness under the land use laws and regulations and
> under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act is fire regime condition
> class and its trends. Since fire regime condition class is a landscape
> attribute, the monitoring strategy incorporates the 5-year reporting
> requirement in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act as the appropriate
> time frame. In many places, a unit-wide assessment of fire regime
> condition class is not budgetarily feasible and often too little
> change has occurred to detect or to identify landscape trends
> adequately.
>
> The minimum requirements to meet the monitoring requirements for
> project effectiveness under the regulations and the Healthy Forests
> Restoration Act are burn day fire weather, burn day fire behavior, and
> first order treatment effects. Since burn day fire weather and fire
> behavior are already covered under the prescribed fire plan
> requirements, the monitoring strategy focuses on first order treatment
> effects and establishes core data elements, protocols, and data
> standards for qualitative and quantitative monitoring of first order
> treatment effects.

3.  **What about second order treatment effects?**

> The strategy recognizes the budgetary and personnel constraints in
> including second order treatment effects as a monitoring requirement.
> These effects often take more than one year to manifest and often are
> the result of additional factors than just the fuel treatment. The BLM
> is limited by regulation to just monitoring first order treatment
> effects in the first year following treatment, therefore, this
> limitation was accepted for the Forest Service in order to facilitate
> interagency monitoring.
>
> Recall that a significant portion of first order treatment effects is
> the changes in fuels/vegetation resulting from the treatment. Second
> order treatment effects are the out growth of first order effects, or
> changes in vegetation. Monitoring first order effects should provide
> the needed information to make a determination of preliminary second
> order effects with little or no additional data collection required.
> Lastly, the plots established for quantitative monitoring are
> permanent plots. Other resource specialists can use these same plots
> as part of their monitoring of second order effects.
>
> We also encourage fuels managers to leverage the available funds for
> fuels monitoring with other resource funds to collect any additional
> data needed at the same time that first order treatment effects
> monitoring occurs. These funds may be leveraged by the contributions
> of funds to pay contractors or fuels personnel to collect data or by
> contributions of personnel who accompany fuels monitoring personnel to
> collect the data needed as part of the same trip.

4.  **Why can't we just use the NFPORS database to monitor changes in
    FRCC?**

> Fire regime condition class is a landscape attribute; NFPORS, by and
> large, records stand attributes. There have been several methods
> developed and used to determine stand scale FRCC, making the data in
> NFPORS inconsistent and incomparable from year to year. The current
> method calls for assigning FRCC on the basis of seral stage abundance
> or rarity based on the landscape scale assessment for each PNVG. A
> treatment regimen may result in an individual stand moving from a
> seral stage that is rare to one that is common or vice versa, but
> there is no guarantee and no way to tell that enough changes have been
> made at the landscape scale to have the same effect. Where several
> treatment activities occur in the same stand, NFPORS records all those
> acres separately, distorting the acre counts. The change reported in
> NFPORS is based solely on the change in vegetation and not change in
> fire frequency or severity, which are given equal weight in the FRCC
> process. Lastly, changes in FRCC can result from natural events such
> as a windstorm, fire, or insect outbreak; NFPORS does not track these
> types of changes. Therefore, NFPORS is incapable adequately of
> tracking FRCC changes in landscapes. It is a conscious misuse of the
> landscape ecology science behind FRCC to report changes in FRCC at the
> stand scale.

5.  **Won't LANDFIRE track FRCC changes over time?**

> In theory -- yes. The LANDFIRE project has apparently been approved as
> a continuous project with complete remapping every 10 years and
> updates every other year. It remains to be seen if the program will be
> funded.
>
> However, as experience has shown, the LANDFIRE approach to FRCC has
> problems. LANDFIRE reports FRCC as a stand (pixel) scale attribute
> when the science supporting the FRCC process clearly states that it
> should be a landscape scale attribute. Because there is no systematic
> sampling of rangeland vegetation, as compared to FIA plots for
> forests, the underlying vegetation data for rangeland ecosystems is
> not as robust, leading to a greater potential for significant errors.
> Field level use of the FRCC data in rangelands indicates that the
> center of large vegetation areas appears to be adequate, however as
> one approaches the boundary of another biophysical setting, the data
> become increasingly inaccurate.

6.  **When will the core attributes to monitor and minimum data
    standards be established?**

> The core attributes and minimum data standards have been established
> in the monitoring strategy. These attributes are based on the
> breakdown of the fuels complex as described in the Fuels
> Characteristic Class System. The minimum standards are intended to
> allow flexibility in the monitoring specifics to allow for data
> refinements requested by other resource specialists. They have also
> been expanded to include other elements of interest to other resource
> specialists, although not necessarily to the fuels program.

7.  **What about monitoring fire weather and fire behavior?**

> Monitoring fire weather and fire behavior has been a required part of
> burn plan implementation for several years. These data should be
> recorded during burning and mop-up operations and included as part of
> the Burn Boss Report. For these reasons, monitoring fire weather and
> fire behavior were not included in the monitoring strategy.
> Interpreting the monitoring data for both first and second order fire
> effects requires data on fire weather and fire behavior during the
> operational period in order to tie the effects observed to the burning
> conditions. This link is vital for adaptive management.

8.  **How will we monitor changes in fire behavior on landscapes?**

> Monitoring how fuel treatments alter fire behavior on the landscape is
> a form of validation monitoring and beyond the scope of this strategy.
> Methods for monitoring changes in fire behavior at the landscape scale
> have not been developed. At present, the best we can do is simulation
> modeling. Units may elect to use the actual changes in the landscape
> resulting from a treatment project, adjust underlying data layers in
> GIS, and rerun landscape scale fire behavior simulators such as
> FARSITE to compare the post-treatment landscape to the expected
> post-treatment landscape modeled as part of project planning.
>
> In addition, units have been requested to report how fire behavior or
> fire effects were altered when a wildfire burns into or through any
> vegetation treatment. Electronic forms were sent to the administrative
> units in summer 2008. A website for reporting this information is
> under development along with an updated effort to reach the best
> audience for this type of monitoring.

9.  **How will the data from this effort be incorporated into FACTS and
    NFPORS?**

> FACTS is a Forest Service budget and activity tracking database that
> does not include monitoring. NFPORS is an interagency upward reporting
> and accomplishment database that does not include any scientifically
> sound monitoring. This monitoring strategy is interagency in nature
> and will not be integrated into FACTS or NFPORS under their present
> incarnation. FFI is a stand-alone database that is not intended to be
> integrated with budget and accomplishment databases.

10. **How does this strategy integrate with the Forest Service regional
    vegetation strategy?**

> The monitoring strategy is not integrated specifically with the Forest
> Service regional vegetation strategy. The monitoring strategy is
> interagency; the vegetation strategy, like FACTS, is single agency.
> However, there is nothing in the monitoring strategy that is
> incompatible with the vegetation strategy. There is no reason data and
> analyses from the monitoring strategy cannot be used to support the
> Forest Service vegetation strategy. The monitoring strategy provides
> for monitoring changes in FRCC over time in support of objective 3.
> Objectives 1 and 2 are related to the effects of unplanned fires and
> not the effects of fuels treatment directly.

11. **Where will the funds come from to pay for this monitoring?**

> There will be no new funds for the monitoring covered by this
> strategy. It has been the position of the agencies for several years
> that funds to cover monitoring of first order treatment effects are
> included in the funds to implement projects. The strategy recognizes
> budget constraints and target pressures by requiring only the minimum
> amount of quantitative monitoring to draw valid conclusions by using 5
> years of data instead of a single year and summarizing that data over
> a larger area rather than a single project.
>
> Units are encouraged to undertake more quantitative monitoring than
> the minimum required. Projects that are especially sensitive for
> social or ecological reasons would be good candidates for quantitative
> monitoring and for installing more plots than the minimum required.

12. **Where does FCCS fit with this strategy?**

> The Fuels Characteristic Class System was the basis for the core
> elements established in the monitoring strategy. The intent was to
> allow use of FCCS to describe the pre- and post-treatment fuel
> complexes and to integrate FCCS into the FRCC process. FCCS also
> provided the clearest descriptions of the different elements of the
> fuels complex that units may wish monitor. Quantitative monitoring
> does not require that units measure all elements described in the FCCS
> system and used as the core elements, only those elements that are
> relevant to the project objectives.

13. **What is the life expectancy of the quantitative plots? Are they
    really 'permanent'?**

> For the purposes of first order treatment effects, the quantitative
> plots have a life expectancy of approximately one year to cover a
> pre-treatment reading and a post-treatment reading. The plots are
> considered 'permanent' in that you revisit the exact same location for
> the pre- and post-treatment reading in order to reduce the amount of
> variability and the number of plots needed to detect real trends. At
> least some plots can have a longer life expectancy if other resource
> disciplines wish to assume stewardship of plots in order to track
> second order treatment effects for a longer time or to track
> successional changes over time arising from a particular treatment
> regimen. Some second order treatment effects can take up to 5 years to
> become apparent.

14. **Are we limited only to the level of quantitative monitoring
    described?**

> No. The strategy described is a bare bones minimum needed to comply
> with the monitoring requirements of the Healthy Forests Restoration
> Act. We encourage units to monitor beyond one year and to install more
> quantitative plots than the minimum called for in this strategy.
> Herbaceous plants in particular are also sensitive to subsequent
> weather and may easily take two to three years to fully respond to a
> given treatment regime. Additional quantitative plots than the minimum
> described would be needed for a given unit or subunit to monitor fuels
> program effectiveness on an annual basis or for a single project.

15. **Can I use some other sampling design other than what is described
    in Appendix B of the strategy?**

> No if you plan to engage only in the minimum amount of monitoring
> required in this strategy. Yes if you plan or already have a program
> that is more extensive than the minimum required. Units with a larger
> program are encouraged to use a stratified sampling approach.

16. **Changes in vegetation resulting from the treatment may take more
    than one year to fully manifest. Should the required monitoring be
    longer than one year?**

> Monitoring vegetation changes for more than one year is an option, but
> is not presently required due to budget limitations on fuels funding
> established at the national level. Vegetation response often takes
> more than one year to fully manifest due to post-treatment weather and
> growing conditions and the time needed for germination and
> establishment from seeds or other propagules. If these responses are
> the most important, units are encouraged to provide for additional
> funds since change in vegetation is what usually drives most other
> second order fire effects. If budget limitations change in the future
> and monitoring needs are more explicitly recognized in national budget
> direction, this guidance may change.

17. **Can the Forest Service use FACTS treatment codes instead of NFPORS
    treatment codes?**

> Yes. For reporting to Congress, the FACTS codes are cross-walked into
> NFPORS codes. We are unsure exactly how using the two difference codes
> will work in developing maps for use by IMTs, but hope to be able to
> cross-walk treatment codes from FACTS as well to provide a consistent
> map across administrative boundaries.

18. **Will the Regional Office or State Office issue direction to other
    program areas instructing them to pay their share of monitoring
    costs?**

> This strategy will be distributed to other program areas to make them
> aware of it and to aid in interdisciplinary coordination. If another
> resource program wishes to have monitoring conducted on a hazardous
> fuels project that is not a first order effects directly tied to the
> treatment objectives, the hazardous fuels program is not required to
> pay for that monitoring. This still leaves the tricky issue of first
> order effects that cannot be adequately assessed at the minimum level
> of one year post-treatment. Delayed mortality, often a constraint on
> treatment design, and the response of herbaceous vegetation, including
> invasive plants, can take up to three years to fully manifest. The
> Forest Service is not constrained by a time limit on use of hazardous
> fuels money to monitor treatment effects, but the BLM is. There is no
> cut-and-dried answer to this conundrum that the Regional Office and
> State Office can provide. We hope the individual units can resolve the
> funding issues for monitoring first order effects beyond a single
> year.

19. **Does the 1-year post-treatment timeframe refer only to Level 3
    monitoring of first order effects?**

> Technically, it also applies to the Level 2 monitoring as well as
> Level 3. However, Level 2 monitoring should be quite inexpensive and
> relatively easy to carry on beyond a single year post-treatment
> without causing a significant impact to the fuels budget. In
> conducting level 2 beyond one year post-treatment, we encourage units
> to focus such monitoring on a select number of the minimum 10%
> required rather than all such treatment units. Administrative units
> have full discretion to determine whether to monitor beyond a single
> year and which treatment units will be monitored for a longer period.