After going radio silent since last growing season and a flurry of activity over the last few months, we’re very excited to show you version 2 of the Rangeland Productivity Monitoring Service (RPMS) projections, now called FuelCast. RPMS remains a joint effort with the USFS on a project envisioned and led by Matt Reeves (matt.c.reeves@usda.gov). Over the winter we completely overhauled the machine learning used to make these projections and switched our engine over to Google’s Earth Engine and Tensorflow so that we could expand our work area outside of just USFS Regions 1 and 4. We now are producing rangeland fuel projections for Region 1, 4, and 6 with updates every week, and are looking into expanding into all of the western US!
After we had our new machine learning pipeline set up, we looked for better ways to distribute the data. This resulting in a partnership with other USFS teams and they have produced the official RPMS map package. Find that HERE. You can download a map package with the projected peak rangeland fuel in pounds per acre, the projected day-of-year of the peak, and comparisons with how this year is projected to compare to previous years. We also have raster layers available to download.
We also have released the first version of our online data viewing app! www.fuelcast.net
We’ll be filling out the descriptions and interactivity of the app incrementally over the next few months. This will be our platform for releasing new products as we develop them, such as fuel models based on our projections.
We’re super excited about all the new developments and the potential for new research opportunities. Look for our weekly updates of the rangeland fuel projections!
Stay healthy out there!