Central Washington Initiative Demonstration: Starter Project

To help users become accustomed to the BioSum user interface, workflow, and outputs, a relatively compact BioSum “starter” project is available for download. Every step in the BioSum framework has been completed: plots loaded, silivicultural treatments specified and simulated in FVS, harvest cost parameters assigned, Processor module run, effectiveness variables defined, and Optimizer executed.

 

Users interested in BioSum are encouraged to download the starter project and use it to explore inputs, outputs and overall workflow of a BioSum analysis. This version of the starter project, labeled CWI_DEMO was constructed using BioSum version 5.11.1.

 

---->Download starter project here (cwi_demo.zip, 620 MB, compatible with BioSum v. 5.11.1)

 

---->Download starter project overview PDF here

 

---->Download starter project walk-through (step-by-step) here

 

The Central Washington Initiative (CWI) landscape:

This landscape contains approximately 2.3 million acres of forest land within the counties of Celan, Kittitas, Okanagan and Yakima in central Washington, just east of the Cascade crest, and a mix of land ownerships, with national forest accounting for 75 percent of the forest area, with 13 percent in state ownership and most of the rest privately owned. Dry and mesic mixed conifer forests are found there, as well as pure ponderosa pine, and opportunities abound to promote greater fire resistance in all of them to varying degrees. The Forest Service selected this landscape as one of the first ten nationwide to prioritize for implementing its Wildfire Crisis Strategy owing to its importance for reducing fire risk to communities in many parts of this landscape. As a demonstration project, this project includes all FIA plot data within the landscape boundary and provides an opportunity to experiment with a real landscape where fuels treatments are not only contemplated but actively underway. The area actually treated in this landscape will likely be far less than the entire landscape, by design, though that is not reflected in this demonstration project which is intended to orient users to the BioSum workflow. Geographic selection of plots to include in analysis is outside the scope of this version of the project and is a known limitation that will be addressed in future versions.

Map of study area