Forestry and Parks - Request for Proposal - 2025 Forest Fire Mapping and Interpretation

Natural disturbances, such as forest fires, have a major impact on forest cover in Alberta. As a result, it is necessary to capture the extent and attributes of the fires so that the impact of the fires upon natural resources can be determined. Fire boundaries are used to assess the impact of fires on the Annual Allowable Cut, to plan salvage logging and for future landscape level modeling. Forest Stewardship and Trade Branch (FSTB) normally captures the fire boundaries in-house, as per Wildfire Management Branch (WMB) standards. FSTB requires contractors to capture forest fire polygons for the 2024 fire season. The successful completion of this service requires the vendor to provide photo-interpreter(s) with previous experience in delineating wildfire polygons. The objective of this project is to capture the outer extent and the attributes of the polygons within the fires, using digital imagery in a softcopy environment. The imagery (30 to 40cm 4-band colour IR) has been acquired in the summer or fall of 2024. This project will acquire digital boundaries and their attributes for the fires listed in Appendix B.1, to the specifications outlined in Appendix B.6. The estimated area is 304,809.70 hectares. Not all the proposed fires requiring mapping may have imagery acquired and may therefore be removed from the contract. Greg Sather, Reforestation, Inventory and Biometrics Section, Forest Stewardship and Trade Branch, Forestry and Parks will be the Project Manager for this Project (contact information in Appendix B, Section B.9). Once the Contract has been awarded, the Contractor will be given softcopy ready stereo imagery, orientation files and a surface model required to complete the Contract. Additional materials supplied are as follows: • Current GPS boundaries (Year-to-date boundaries) • Historical fire data available at http://wildfire.alberta.ca/wildfire-maps/historical-wildfire-information/spatial-wildfire-data.aspx • Alberta Vegetation Inventory (AVI) • Post-inventory cutblocks where available • Post-inventory land use updates (DIDS) • Base Features Hydrography • Base Features Access • LiDAR The Contractor and the Project Manager will discuss the progress of the project on, at the very least, a biweekly basis. The three major stakeholders include Wildfire Management Branch, Forest Stewardship and Trade Branch and the forest industry.