Development of a WebGIS-Based Analysis Tool for Human Health Protection from the Impacts of Prescribed Fire Smoke in Southeastern USA

Yongtao Hu,Armistead G Russell,Mehmet Talat Odman,Ha Hang Ai,Ambarish Vaidyanathan

doi:10.3390/ijerph16111981

Abstract

We have developed the Southern Integrated Prescribed Fire Information System (SIPFIS) to disseminate prescribed fire information, including daily forecasts of potential air quality impacts for southeastern USA. SIPFIS is a Web-based Geographic Information Systems (WebGIS) assisted online analysis tool that provides easy access to air quality and fire-related data products, and it facilitates visual analysis of exposure to smoke from prescribed fires. We have demonstrated that the information that SIPFIS provides can help users to accomplish several fire management activities, especially those related to assessing environmental and health impacts associated with prescribed burning. SIPFIS can easily and conveniently assist tasks such as checking residential community-level smoke exposures for personal use, pre-screening for fire-related exceptional events that could lead to air quality exceedances, supporting analysis for air quality forecasts, and the evaluation of prescribed burning operations, among others. The SIPFIS database is currently expanding to include social vulnerability and human health information, and this will evolve to bring more enhanced interactive functions in the future.

Highlights

The relative contribution of biomass burning to local air quality in the USA has increased over the past decade, due to enhanced regulatory controls on anthropogenic emissions [1] and increasing wildfires, prescribed forest fires, and agricultural burns [2]
The major components of Southern Integrated Prescribed Fire Information System (SIPFIS) include the HiRes2-prescribed fire impacts-forecasting system—an in-house tool that produces air quality and prescribed burn impact data as a result of operational forecasting and other derivative products such as smoke exposure data, etc., a data-fetching component that automatically obtains outside datasets, a data-archiving component that performs data format conversion, Quality Assurance/Quality Control, and data management, and a data visualization and analysis component that directly meets the end user’s requests for interactive online analyses
Can be used as a screening tool for fire-related exceptional events that led to exceedances and violations of air quality standards, or a supporting analysis tool to assist and evaluate air quality forecasts

Summary

Introduction

The relative contribution of biomass burning to local air quality in the USA has increased over the past decade, due to enhanced regulatory controls on anthropogenic emissions [1] and increasing wildfires, prescribed forest fires, and agricultural burns [2]. Smoke from any individual prescribed burn has a much smaller and usually local impact, occasionally, downwind impacts can be substantial [6]. Chronic exposure to prescribed fire smoke in places where burning is heavily practiced, such as southeastern USA, can be just as important as acute exposure to wildfire smoke. In the USA, 2.4 million acres of forests were treated by prescribed fire in 2014 [2]. About 80 % of the 3 million acres of agricultural burning nationwide takes place in the southeast. As a result, prescribed burning is the largest source of particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than

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