Software¶
Licensed Software¶
Why pay for software?
Paying for software can give you the tools you need, with a minimal amount of effort required to learn how to use and maintain them. Selecting the right set of software to pay for can save the most valuable thing you posess: your time!
That being said, expensive licensed software are often not available to international researchers from the Global South or underserved communities or institutions.
Geographic Information Systems¶
How I learned to stop worrying, and love the ArcGIS 
ESRI's ArcGIS and ArcGIS Online are typically the first Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software taught to students at universities and community colleges.
ESRI products dominate the US market and are found in most government agencies.
ESRI products are widely used in wildland fire incident management (in the US).
Strategic Risk Assessment (SRA) and Strategic Operations Story Maps
Risk Management Assistance Dashboard
Potential wildland fire operational delineations (PODs)
Story Map example from 2020 Fire Affected Road System Risk Reduction Project
Access to ArcGIS requires an expensive software license agreement. Normally this cost is paid for by contracting agreements through your agency or local government. If you're working for a smaller agency or non-governmental organization, these costs can be prohibitive.
ESRI's software products do rely on open source software like GDAL, and Python which can be used with Jupyter Notebooks
ArcGIS Online Wildland Fire Applications
Google Maps Platform - Leverage Google's Web Mapping APIs for web-based applications
MapBox - Popular Web map and location API
Commercial Fire Behavior Models¶
First Street Foundation support the RiskFactor.com with a paid service and data access model
Pyregence - Funded by the California Energy Commission, provides fire forecasting tools.
( vaporware)NVIDIA Omniverse FARSITE press-release 2021
Structure from Motion Photogrammetry¶
Agisoft Metashape - Metashape is one of the most widely adopted software for survey-grade mapping applications
Pix4D - Pix4D offers a simple interface and hosted processing solutions
DroneDeploy - Drone Deploy offers hosted processing solutions
DJI Ground Station Pro - DJI are peerless drone manufacturers with fully integrated software for mission planning
DJI Terra - DJI structure from motion and lidar software
Productivity and Integrated Development Environments¶
GitHub - the most widely used version control platform based on git
- CodeSpaces - Cloud-based virtual machines that work with GitHub Repositories
- CoPilot - AI assisted code
ChatGPT - AI assisted code writing
Free and Open Source Software¶
Using open source software allows other researchers to reproduce your work and increases access to your work as part of a research object or data cube.
Open Source Fire Behavior Models¶
Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WDFSS) - system assists fire managers and analysts in making strategic and tactical decisions for fire incidents.
Fire.org - Free software for the wildland fire community
Open Wildland Fire Modeling Wiki
Ecosystem models¶
Climate Toolbox - collection of web tools for visualizing past and projected climate and hydrology of the contiguous United States.
FIREBGCv2 - modeling program and platform that mechanistically simulates fire, vegetation, climate, and fuels dynamics across multiple space and time scales.
LANDIS-II - landscape model simulates forests (both trees and shrubs) at decadal to multi-century time scales and spatial scales spanning hundreds to millions of hectares.
Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) - is an integrated informatics toolbox for ecosystem modeling.
GIS¶
The Open Source Geospatial Software Foundation (OSGEO) has broad support across Linux-based operating systems, making it cloud-ready for advanced fire applications.
CloudCompare - 3D point cloud and mesh processing software Open Source Project
FUSION - providing fast, efficient, and flexible access to LIDAR, IFSAR, and terrain datasets
GDAL - the geospatial data abstraction tool (GDAL) is the bedrock of open source GIS
GRASS-GIS - US Army Corps of Engineers GIS with numerous topographic and hyrdological algorithms
Kepler.gl - is a data-agnostic, high-performance web-based application for visual exploration of large-scale geolocation data sets
Open Drone Map - Generate maps, point clouds, DEMs and 3D models from aerial images.
Overture Maps - (future) FOSS competitor to Google Maps
PDAL - the pointcloud data abstraction tool (PDAL) is the most powerful open source GIS for manipulating point cloud data
QGIS - Quantum GIS, an open source alternative to ESRI ArcGIS
SAGA-GIS - European GIS with numerous topographic and hydrological algorithms
WhiteBox Geospatial - a cross platform open-source tool for raster analyses
Popular Integrated Development Environments¶
Project Jupyter - Browser based computational notebooks, focused on Python, but any computer kernel can be installed as add-ons
Posit (RStudio) - RStudio is the most popular IDE for working with the R-language
VS Code - Microsoft's free Visual Studio Code is the most popular and fully featured code editor in the world
Python¶
PANGEO - community platform for big data geoscience
GEEMap - collection of ove 360 notebooks for Google Earth Engine ( Qiusheng Wu)
Planetary Computer Jupyter Notebooks
Repositories, Notebooks, and Short Courses¶
Agent-based Modeling - Agent-based modeling 2D wildfire suppression simulator tool built on the mesa framework in Python
Call for Code Spot Challenge for Wildfires - predict the wildfire/bushfire area for 7 regions in Australia for each day in February 2021
FIRe Event Delineation for python (FIREDpy) - Command Line Interface for classifying fire events from the Collection 6 MODIS Burned Area Product
Wildfire Modelling in Yosemite, ( Abraham Coiman)
Predict the causes of wildland fires using Python
Create interactive map of wildfire data using Folium in Python
Wildfire Datascience (Andrew Mahon)
Wildfire danger short course - First release, finalised for the 'Short Course on ECMWF and Copernicus data and service offering for monitoring and forecasting fire danger' (11-19 May 2020 EUMETSAT-ECMWF-Copernicus).
Wildfire Smoke Detection with AI - ( Paulino Moskwa)
R¶
Forest Analysis in R App - Shiny App with list of available packages for forestry analyses.
burnR - Fire history analysis tools for R
dplR - dendrochronology R tools, now OpenDendro
firebehavioR - R package for predicting fire behavior using the Rothermel modelling system or the Crown Fire Initiation & Spread modelling system.
lidR - R package for manipulating and visualizating airborne laser scanning (ALS) data with an emphasis on forestry applications.
Geospatial Frameworks¶
CSIRO Data61 - Australian CSIRO fire modelling software
ESA STEP - European Scientific Toolbox Exploitation Platform
FRAMES - Fire Research and Management Exchange System
USFS RMRS - Rocky Mountain Research Station fire data and tools
WIFIRE - Workflows for wildland fire science applications, NSF funded.
Productivity¶
Anaconda (conda) - is a package management and deployment system for scientific software (mainly Python)
Conda Forge - is the largest repository for packages in conda
Docker - is the most common format for "containerizing" software environments
Git - the git version control system
GitLab - GitLab is an open source, self-hosted, or web-hosted version control system
CyberDuck - 3rd party software for getting data to and from the internet