The National Fire Plan is a cooperative, long-term effort of several governmental and non-governmental organizations that seeks to manage impacts of wildland fire by addressing five key points: firefighting, rehabilitation, hazardous fuels reduction, community assistance, and accountability. Users can access and download yearly progress reports, and fuels treatment reports, and use a map viewer to ... Full description.

This site, from the USDA Forest Service, allows users to discover the science of wildfires, the difference between good fires and bad fires, and ways to help prevent wildfires from occurring. Full description.

This portal provides links to documents produced by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), a group consisting of agencies of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Association of State Foresters. Materials accessible here include NWCG qualifications documents, information on prescribed fires, ... Full description.

This short Why Files article discusses the effects of the earthworm on the ecology of some northern deciduous forests. In these ecosystems, glaciers extirpated all worms over 10,000 years ago. The forest ecologist interviewed for this article indicated that in northern Minnesota, the worms probably came from fishing bait that was dumped in the woods over several decades. The earthworms rapidly munch ... Full description.

fire.org is the home page of Systems for Environmental Management (SEM), a Montana nonprofit research and educational corporation. The site features publications and downloadable software packages developed in cooperation with the Fire Sciences Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. They include scientific publications, informal ... Full description.

In this field activity, students will place a plastic bag over the end of a tree branch with leaves and one without leaves. After waiting a few hours, students can observe which bag contains water, as proof that trees release water into the air through their leaves. Pictures of the results can be sent in for posting on the website. Full description.

In 1994 lightning triggered a fire that torched a 22,000-acre swath of boreal spruce forest in Interior Alaska, about 90 miles south of Fairbanks. This 2001 radio broadcast describes work by fire ecologists, seven years later, to determine how the forest is regrowing and whether these northern forest fires are contributing to global warming by releasing significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon ... Full description.

This article from the Fall 1999 issue of CUTechnology provides a brief summary of a joint initiative between CU-Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the Intermountain Fire Sciences Laboratory to study and model wildfires. The research is expected to significantly improve capabilities for modeling wildfires, enabling fire behavior analysts to make effective decisions on ... Full description.

This Internet-based mapping tool was originally designed for fire managers to access online maps of current fire locations and perimeters in the conterminous 48 States and Alaska. Using a standard web browser, fire personnel can download this information to pinpoint the affected areas. With the growing concern of western wildland fires in the summer of 2000, this application also became available ... Full description.

Humans have had a greater impact on forests than on other land ecosystems. This interactive feature uses NASA satellite images taken between 1984 and 2000 to demonstrate just how much of a once densely forested region in Bolivia has been cleared for commercial purposes. Users can view the images as an animation, or click on individual images taken every two years to see the stages of the deforestation. ... Full description.