Week 8: Monitoring Fires
On This Page
Download Geographic Data About the Yellowstone Fires
Launch My World and Open the YNP.axl Project File
Where in the World is Yellowstone National Park?
The Yellowstone National Park Region
Finding Facilities in Yellowstone National Park
- Locate Towns and Campgrounds
- Search for a Feature You Might Want to Visit
- Buffer Old Faithful's Visitor Center for Facilities within 15 Miles
- Find Just the Campgrounds within Your Spatial Query
- Get a Sense of How the Fires Progressed
- Create and Execute a Query to Find Out the Number of Acres Burned by Major Fires
- Select the North Fork Fire?
- Buffer to Select Facilities that were within Two Miles of the Fire
- Find Out how Many Facilities were Threatened by the Fire
- Repeat this process on the Clover-Mist and Hellroaring Fires
Explore More if You Have Time
Resources
Using My World to Manage Forest Fires
Key Investigation Questions:
- Where were the Yellowstone Fires of 1988?
- How was GIS used to assist in the management of these fires ?
- What is the primary cause of forest fire in Yellowstone National Park?
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Download Geographic Data About Yellowstone Fires
- Right-click (Win) or control-click (Mac) the link below to download the zipped file.
YellowstoneFireDataMW (Zip Archive 39.9MB Jun15 10) - Unzip the file. A folder called YellowstoneFireDataMW will be created.
- Move the YellowstoneFireDataMW folder to inside the Data folder of My World
(Path: Applications/My World/data/YellowstoneFireDataMW.)
Launch My World and Open the YNP.m3vz Project File
- Launch My World by double-clicking its icon on your desktop or by clicking its icon in the Dock (Mac) or Launch Bar (Win).
- Choose File > Open Project..., navigate to Applications/My World /data/ YellowstoneFireData, select the file YNP.m3vz, and click Open.
- When the project opens, the base map displays Latitude and Longitude lines, outlines of Countries of the world and the U.S. States. The map highlights states in the northwestern region of the U.S.
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Where in the World is Yellowstone National Park?
- Zoom in to the NW States layer.
- Can you identify the 11 states in this layer? Set the Get Information tool to label the names of the states as you click on them.
- Return to the map. Hover over the any of the states with your cursor and the state will be labeled. Colorado is identified in this example.
top of page - Use the Zoom In
tool to take a closer look at Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding federal lands, such as the National Forest and National Wildlife Refuge. Observe the amount of National Forest surrounding Yellowstone National Park.
- Zoom in even closer on the Yellowstone National Park layer. Turn the layer on and off and use the Get Information Tool to click on the boundary edges to find out which states the park occupies.
- Turn on the Yellowstone Towns layer and make it the active layer. Choose the Get Information tool and click on each town to learn their names.
- Prefer a campground in the park? Then turn on the Yellowstone Facilities layer and find several campgrounds. Open the Attribute table, sort the Features in ascending order, and search for campgrounds.
- To select all the campgrounds, hold the shift key and click on all the campgrounds in the Table of Layer "Yellowstone Facilities".
- Click Make Selection from Rows. Name the selection "campgrounds" and click OK.
- Notice that the campgrounds are now colored yellow on the map.
- How many campgrounds did you select?
- Close the Table of Layer "Yellowstone Facilities".
- Create a query to locate the Old Faithful Visitor Center. top of page
- In Analyze mode select the Make Buffer Around... option to set a 20 mile buffer around Old Faithful Visitor Center. Accept the default Result Name and click OK.
- Click OK. The map shows a 20 mile buffer around the Old Faithful Visitor Center. Edit the Appearance of the layer to 80% transparent with yellow fill.
top of page - To see if any campgrounds are within a 20 mile radius of Old Faithful Visitor Center, open the Table of Layer of the Yellowstone Facilities and scroll over to the NAME field. Then sort the selected data to the top of the table.
- Look in the FEATURE field to see if any campgrounds were selected.
- What campgrounds is within 20 miles of Old Faithful Visitor Center
- When you are done, click the Delete Selection button to delete the selection of facilities near Old Faithful. Also turn off the buffer layer of Old Faithful. top of page
- Turn on the Historic Yellowstone Fires layer by checking the box to the right of its name.
- To investigate the dates of the fire, Open the Table of Layer for the Historic Yellowstone Fires layer and sort the DATE field in ascending and descending order. NOTE: The date format is year–month-day. Search for the name of the first and last fire of 1988. The unburned areas have the date "1988". top of page
- First, set up a query to locate the North Fork Fire. Then use the Statistics button in the mapwindow to investigate the extent of the North Fork Fire. Repeat this process for the other large fires including Clover-Mist, Mink, Storm Creek, and Hellroaring.
- Close the Statistics window.
- What were the total numbers of acres burned for these fires?
- Estimate what percentage of Yellowstone National Park burned in 1988. top of page
- Make the Historic Yellowstone Fires layer active by clicking on its name in the Layer List.
- Click the Analyze tab and set up a query to select the North Fork fire. Once this fire is selected it will be highlighted yellow.
- Record 3 threatened facilities from each of the following fires: North Fork, Clover-Mist, and Hellroaring.
- Envision that you are the fire manager. How would you make decisions as to what to save, what to evacuate, and what roads to open or close? Put yourself in the "hot seat".
Experiment with different sized buffers around the each of the Historic Yellowstone Fire polygons to get a sense of a fire manager's decision-making strategies during a fire of this magnitude. - Use the Data Library pull down menu and select the Yellowstone Data Library. Add other data sets from the data folder to the map that could be of interest to a fire manager, such as cabins, camps, trails, and roads.
Consider the following:- What data would be important during a crisis such as a fire?
- How would you move equipment and firefighters?
- What areas would require evacuation?
- When you are finished exploring, click the Delete Selection button.
- What were the contributing factors that lead to the enormous fires of 1988?
- How do today's park managers decide which fires to fight and which fires to let burn naturally?
- Switch to the Yellowstone Data Library and add the Yellowstone Fire Starts layer. Investigate its Attribute table. Then edit the properties of the layer to make it more visible. Last, turn on the Yellowstone Roads layer.
- What is the most common cause of fires in Yellowstone National Park?
- Use the Measure tool to measure the distance from the road to the smoker caused fires. Describe the relationship between human caused fires and roadways. Thought Question: In your opinion, what is the best prevention tool needed to manage and control fires in National Parks?
- Turn of all layers except the NW States and U.S. States layers on the project map.
- Add the TriStateFires 01-08.shp layer. This layer has been selected to show only this 3 state region. It was selected from a larger, National map showing all significant fires in the years 2001-2008.
- View the regions of the Northwest States of Idaho, MT, Colorado, and Wyoming where wildfires have occurred in the past seven years.
- Set the Appearance of the TriStateFires 01-08.shp to the following:
- Draw features using: First_Year
- Colorscheme: Yellow-Red
- Fill Color Count: 7
- Classify By: Equal Interval
- Make the Outline Color Transparent
- Click Apply and Close.
- Consider the following questions:
- What regions seem to be most prone to fires?
- Which State had the most fires in 2007?
- View the drought conditions map from July 2007 that is to the right. (Click on the map to view a larger version.) Do you see a correlation between drought conditions and fire frequency?
- Read more about this NASA partnership at NASA Satellites Eye Forest Fires
- Read more about NASA's role in the management of the 1988 fires, summarized from Yellowstone Science web pages and The Fires of '88 by Ross W. Simpson.
- View an animation of the fire progression from NASA.
- To learn more read the articles about the Arnica fire from September 24th and October 12th, 2009 listed below:
- NASA Earth Observatory Story: Arnica Fire
- NASA Earth Observatory Story: Arnica Fire Oct
- Wildland Fire in Yellowstone on the web.
- View pictures of the major facilities at Yellowstone National Park during the fire. Included are the features: Grant Village Campground, Madison Junction, Old Faithful Lodge and the East and North Entrances.Pictures of 1988 fires in PDF (Acrobat (PDF) 5.1MB Apr2 10)
Locate Yellowstone in the Region
Turn on the National Forest, Yellowstone National Park, Teton Natl Park, and Natl Wildlife Refuge layers.Yellowstone Park and Federal Lands
Focus on Finding Facilities in Yellowstone National Park
Planning a trip to see Yellowstone and its magnificent features? You would probably want to know more about the facilities in and around the park, such as where might you find a hotel outside of Yellowstone National Park or where to find a campground that is closest to the attractions that you have traveled to see. Use GIS techniques to find the towns close to the northern, western, and eastern boundaries of Yellowstone National Park.
top of pageLocate towns and campgrounds
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Search for a feature you might want to visit
Buffer the Old Faithful Visitor Center to find facilities that are located within a 20 mile radius of it
Find campgrounds that resulted from the spatial query
The Historic 1988 Fires in Yellowstone National Park
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Get a sense of how the fires progressed
Create and execute a Query to find out the number of acres burned by the major fires
Discover Which Yellowstone Facilities were Threatened by the Fires
top of pageSelect the North Fork fire
Buffer the fire to select facilities that were within two miles of the fire
top of pageFind out how many facilities were threatened by the fire
top of pageRepeat this process on the Clover-Mist and Hellroaring Fires
Wind fans fires
On a windy day, a forest fire like those in Yellowstone National Park can rapidly engulf new areas as far as 10 miles from the previous fire boundaries. Fire managers constantly use weather reports, terrain maps, and other information, such as images from airplanes to make decisions about where to put their fire fighting efforts. At the same time they also must decide which areas to evacuate and which roads to close. Since the Yellowstone fires 20 years ago, the tools of technology, like GIS and satellites, have greatly aided the decision making process.Consider Fire Management Decisions in National Parks
Fire management in the National Parks allows for the natural progression of fires. As far back as 1972, fire management in Yellowstone National Park encouraged as many as possible of the lightening-caused fires to progress naturally while protecting human life, properties, and historic structures. In contrast, all human-caused fires are to be suppressed. Prescribed burning is to be utilized to prevent the spread of fires.
From the time the fire management plan in Yellowstone National Park went into effect in 1972, until the fires of '88 erupted, 34,175 acres had burned in Yellowstone due to natural causes. The summer of 1988 broke all the rules of fire, and forever changed fire management strategies. Now, while protecting human life is first priority, fires are allowed to play their ecological role in the park.
Fire: just part of nature?
Investigate the relationship between fire starts and roads.
Generally, how far are the human caused fires away from the highways in Yellowstone National Park?
Should fires be allowed to burn in National Forest and National Parks?
While horrific to view, fire is as natural a part of the western ecosystem as are bears and elk. In fact, fire often improves habitats for some animals, increasing grazing for elk and providing dead trees that can be used for nesting cavities for birds. A natural fire such as the one in Yellowstone National Park burns in a pattern known as a mosaic. This mosaic pattern is healthy for a forest because it creates forested areas that are mixed in both age and plant type. This mixed structure can be seen developing in the satellite images and aerial photographs from NASA.
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Explore More if your have Time
The Fires in the Northwest US 2001-2008
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