Current Fire Management Program Acronyms You Might Hear

EMDS – **Ecosystem Management Decision Support** is a model used by the Department of Interior to set priorities for fuels treatment fund allocation.  It is part of HFPAS (see below).

FPA -  **Fire Program Analysis** is an out-year workload and budget planning tool.  FPA divides the country up into a set of fire planning units (geographic areas with similar fuels, topography and fire loads).  Fire managers from all agencies within a fire planning unit cooperate on using FPA’s modeling system to determine staffing and funding levels needed for all the participants to accomplish their fire management objectives.  The program is intended to gain efficiencies by eliminating redundancies in overlapping equipment and staffing levels within fire planning units.  

FPDSS  - **Fire Program Decision Support System** is a BLM-only system (in development) that will be used to establish base funding for States for their fire programs.  FPDSS is used only by the national office to calculate a fair and appropriate division of funds to send to State offices.

FRAMES  -  **Fire Research and Management Exchange System** is a program that provides a systematic method of exchanging information and transferring technology between wildland fire researchers, managers, and other stakeholders in order to make wildland fire documents, data tools, and other information resources easier to find, access, distribute, compare and use.  Publicly accessible documents in this system are organized according to subject areas, geographic areas, and partner sites.

HFPAS  -  The **Hazardous Fuels Priority Allocation System**is used to establish priorities and funding for Fuels programs between Department of Interior fire agencies.  One of the tools used by HFPAS is the EMDS model.

IFPM  -  **Interagency Fire Program Management** is an initiative to establish professional qualification standards for 13 key fire management positions.  This initiative was launched in order to improve fireline safety through dedicated leadership, professional managerial and supervisory standards, and interagency consistency.  IFPM is scheduled for implementation in October 2010, and IFPM mandates that employees in the 13 key positions obtain the necessary academic and professional training necessary to meet qualification requirements.

IQCS  -  **Incident Qualification and Certification System** is the system used by the fire agencies to manage and document the training and qualifications of NWCG-recognized wildland fire responders.

IRWIN – **Integrated Reporting of Wildland-Fire Information** is an enterprise system for reporting fires still in the development phase.  IRWIN is being designed to allow single source data management and entry.  When a dispatcher enters the lat/long for a reported fire, the system will generate a large suite of possible information outputs, such as land ownership, fuels and vegetation, road system, etc.  It will be a dispatching tool when it is ready.

LANDFIRE  -  The **Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools** project is a five-year, multi-partner project producing consistent and comprehensive maps and data describing vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire regimes across the United States.  It is a shared project between the wildland fire management programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior.

WFDSS -  **Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS)** is an interagency tool that assists fire managers and fire behavior analysts in making strategic and tactical decisions for fire incidents.  It replaces the Wildland Fire Situation Analysis (WFSA), the Wildland Fire Implementation Plan (WFIP), and the Long-Term Implementation Plan (LTIP) with a single process that that is responsive to changing fire complexity and is easier to use, more intuitive, linear, and scalable.

WILDCAD – **Wildfire Computer Aided Dispatch** is a simple, easy-to-use computerized dispatch system used in most Western states.