Fire Behavior Assessment Team: in-fire videos from 2020 to 2023

This data publication contains in-fire video collected by the Fire Behavior Assessment Team (FBAT) on a subset of wildland fires in the United States from 2021-2023. FBAT is an interagency group of primarily Forest Service employees with both monitoring and fireline qualifications which collects pre- and post-fire fuels and tree data along with fire behavior measurements on wildland fires. Logistics, funding, fire activity, and monitoring objectives influence the geographic regions and fires where sampling is conducted. Reports from each fire are included as supplemental files wherein the plot layout, including camera positioning, is described. This publication includes a mix of video segments that, collectively, encompass all the video collected at each plot and short videos (clips, ranging from 20 seconds in length to minutes in length) created from those segments. These video clips highlight the variation in fire behavior observed at each plot. In-fire videos are provided for three fires in Oregon and California: the 2020 Red Salmon Complex Fire, the 2021 River Complex (Summer Fire), and the 2023 Lookout Fire. Also included are videos from plots on the Six Rivers National Forest Lightning Complex (SRFLC), Mosquito Fire in 2023 on which Terrestrial Laser Scanning, but no other FBAT measurements, was done pre- and post-fire.
These data were collected by the FBAT team to document how fire burns in the plots sampled. Estimated fire behavior properties such as fire rate of spread, flame length, flame angle, and fire type are estimated from these video data, often in reference to standard poles of known size placed in the camera’s field of view. In-fire video of fire spread can also document other characteristics of fire behavior, such as movement through spotting, tree torching events, ember production, and fire whirl development. Some observations relating to various stages of flaming and smoldering combustion can be made depending on the level of smoke obscuring the view, as can gross observations of smoke production. The purpose of the short video clips is to develop a searchable video library (see https://www.frames.gov/fbat/fire-videos) for education and training as well as provide viewers with several samples of the typical fire behavior observed at each plot because the full length videos can be quite long.
FBAT in-fire videos from 2013-2019 are available in Reiner et al. (2021; https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2021-0069).