Demonstrations are sought of tools, frameworks, and approaches that provide rapid estimation and forecasting of the fuel moisture content (FMC) of live herbaceous and/or woody fuel for wildland fire applications in and around DoW installations. Improved capacity to assess and predict three-dimensional distributions of live FMC at high spatial (meters) and temporal (daily) resolutions would improve wildfire risk forecasting, fire behavior modeling, and prescribed fire planning to support military mission requirements.  Specific objectives include one or more of the following: 

• Integrating and/or validating satellite-based products with weather as well as in situ live FMC measurements to predict live FMC at high temporal and spatial resolutions through innovative modeling and/or machine learning approaches.
• Demonstrating a framework for calibrating, validating, and disseminating rapid refresh live FMC remote sensing models and products that are operationally usable and useful to wildland fire managers and planners.
• Demonstrating use of improved remote sensing and/or modeled estimates and forecasts of live FMC to inform fire danger rating, improve fire behavior modeling, and/or identify prescribed fire prescription windows at DoW installations and surrounding wildlands.
• Developing a live FMC decision support workflow and user interface that is accessible, understandable, and useful to DoW wildland fire managers and planners.
• Linking and relating high spatial and temporal resolution predictions of live FMC to other multi-scale spatial patterns and temporal trends in environmental variables and trends (e.g., temperature, humidity, vapor pressure deficit precipitation, soil moisture at various depths, etc.) for vegetation types or dominant species found on representative DoW lands. 

Improved site-specific assessment and prediction of spatial patterns and evolution of live FMC estimation and will support sustainment of test and training missions at many installations by providing DoW natural resource and wildland fire managers with accurate fuels moisture data they currently lack.  Remote weather stations at most DoW installations are networked internally within DoW; the data are not ingested by the Fire Environment Mapping System (FEMS) for modeling and display, and do not provide live fuel moisture estimates that feed into the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) to produce fire danger indices (Energy Release Component, Burning Index, etc.).  Improved high-resolution live FMC data could be used to assess fire danger, predict fire spread, growth, and intensity, and to assess current and near-future fuel availability to support fire growth.  These secondary products, along with site-specific flammability knowledge, could then be used for establishing wildfire readiness standards (staffing and preparedness levels) and for prescribed fire planning and implementation to balance military mission support with strategic risk management. 

Fuel moisture is a critical factor contributing to the availability of vegetative fuels to burn, and resulting fire behavior, which can, in turn, be used to assess wildfire danger and risk.  Most, if not all, fire behavior prediction models include FMC as a critical input for accurate fire behavior and spread modeling, and many federal land management agencies use fuel moisture as an indicator for local fire danger rating. Prescribed fire plans typically use fuel moistures set at specific minimum thresholds as key metrics within the prescription. While dead fuel moisture depends on the interaction of meteorological conditions and fuel size, composition, and arrangement, much work has explored how it is estimated and forecasted. By contrast, live fuel moisture estimation, once assumed to change slowly, is complicated by weather trends (e.g., flash drought), vegetation types, plant physiology, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration rates among other factors.  

Historically, the most common method for assessing live fuel moistures has been daily to weekly field collection sampling within representative fuel types and manual oven drying and weighing to develop live FMC trends and compare with current conditions.  By comparing live FMC trends with wildfire occurrence and large fire growth, fire managers can identify live FMC thresholds for fire danger rating, preparedness, staffing, and prescribed fire planning among other uses.  FEMS is the official system for applying the NFDRS and has a live FMC “Field Sample” module for reporting and tracking live FMC field samples in addition to summarized RAWS data and trends.  

However, accurate live FMC field sampling can be challenging to sustain due to the demands on staff time, staff turnover, lack of consistency in sampling methods, lack of drying oven and storage, and variability across vegetation types, species sampled and time-of-day within relatively short geographic distances. Most DoW wildland fire programs lack staff time, facilities, and/or experience to conduct live FMC field sampling for their respective installations.  Improved remotely sensed live FMC products and models, once validated for accuracy, would provide DoW fire managers with live FMC estimates they can use for wildland fire planning and implementation without the additional staff time and effort.