Resource of the Week: Fire Information Engine Toolkit
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Until this past spring, I’d always kind of assumed that wildfires were a phenomenon of the American West — you know, where it is dry and desert-y. But this year we were especially plagued by wildfires here in drought-parched Florida. And we are not alone. “Wildfires affect communities around the world,” according to the Center for Fire Research and Outreach in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California-Berkeley.

We first mentioned this site here on ResourceShelf when it launched last fall. It still sports a red “BETA” label. Recently they added a section of “After-wildfire resources for homeowners,” which includes information and links that “can be used by individual homeowners to aid in recovery after a wildfire.” This is a nicely pulled-together collection that compliments the other sections of the site. There are even links to information about assessing vegetation damage and revegetating an area after a fire, such as this Wildfire Protection and Recovery site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The Toolkit site itself is divided into three sections, for homeowners, researchers and decision-makers. Each section contains several annotated links to key resources, plus a longer list of related links. Some of the resources — but by no means the vast majority — are California-specific.

Last May, during the height of the wildfire season, we mentioned the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, ID, which coordinates the efforts of numerous state and federal agencies. We included some links to other wildfire information. But Berkeley’s Center for Fire Outreach offers a whole lot more, including the obligatory list of links, research news, a Google-generated scroll of the latest wildfire news, and a collection of images culled from NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Great resource, folks, but hey… Seeing as how the site is quite extensive now, we think it’s time to add a search engine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 12:23 am and is filed under Resource of the Week, Science, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.