Fuel Sampling - Wildland Fuel Fundamentals and Applications - page 122

Sampling designs can be stratified into two broad categories—inventory and
monitoring. Inventory techniques are used to quantify fuel characteristics for one
point in time, usually for planning and designing fuel treatments and describing fuel
hazard and fire risk (Sampson and Sampson 2005 ). Monitoring involves sampling
to estimate current status and detect change over time, such as that resulting from
fuel treatments or fuel accumulation. There are usually two or more measurements
at the same exact place but at different times (e.g., pretreatment, 1 year post-treat-
ment, and at 5 year intervals after treatment). Monitoring protocols are often quite
rigorous because they must detect subtle changes over time, sometimes across mul-
tiple spatial scales, so more plots and more detailed measurements are sometimes
necessary. Both inventory and monitoring are critical tasks for fire management,
yet there are few standardized efforts to collect field data on fuel properties across
nearly all fire management agencies. To implement effective fuel treatment pro-
grams, which cost millions of dollars, and to assess the efficacy of these treatments,
a comprehensive, standardized fuel sampling program is a critical tool to facilitate
enlightened and adaptive fire and fuel management.
Inventory and monitoring fuel sampling methods are often designed for one of
two broad objectives—research or management. Research sampling techniques
are usually uniquely specialized to quantify some set of fuel properties with high
precision and accuracy to satisfy research objectives. They are often tailored to
answer a specific research question, and because of this, these methods are usu-
ally quite intense (large samples, many plots), highly localized, time-consuming,
costly, and often requiringe highly skilled personnel and specialized equipment.
Since most research sampling techniques were designed around specific study
objectives and study areas, they are often difficult to apply in broader situations,
such as operational fire management. There are many physical fuel properties
measured in research studies, such as heat content and specific gravity, which
change little across fuel particles relative to particle abundance, so these research
results are often used IN many management applications (Nalder et al. 1999 ).
Management-oriented or operational sampling is often done to facilitate the
planning, design, and eventual implementation of a fire management project. Often,
these sampling designs do not require the same degree of accuracy as research sam-
pling, so they are often less intensive, not as costly, and easier to implement (Lutes
et al. 2006 ). Management sampling efforts are often designed to be applied across
large areas by field technicians with little to high levels of training in fuel sampling.
Sampling techniques designed for managers are also often highly generalized so
that they can be applied across diverse areas and situations. This may result in the
application of sampling techniques or protocols that may be inappropriate for a
particular ecosystem or treatment area. Logs, for example, may be sampled using
an insufficient number of transects to meet a desired level of accuracy, especially in
those ecosystems where logs are scarce (Sikkink and Keane 2008 ). The main topic
of this chapter is how to sample fuel biomass for each fuel component. However,
knowledge of the basics of fuel sampling is first needed to fully understand the use
of the methods presented here.