EMBER (Ecosystem-coupled Moisture, Behavior, Effects and Regimes) simulates wildfire as a physical process driven by the vegetation the succession extension already tracks and by the daily weather supplied through the LANDIS-II Climate Library. Instead of fitting statistical spread and severity models to one landscape, EMBER derives fire behavior and effects from established fire science: Rothermel surface spread, Van Wagner and Cruz crown fire, Byram fireline intensity, Van Wagner crown scorch, Ryan and Reinhardt mortality, FOFEM-style consumption. Fire size, seasonality, severity and emissions emerge from the interaction of fuel structure, fuel moisture, weather, topography and suppression.
That makes it usable for climates and fuel conditions with no historical analogue, and for evaluating fuel treatments, prescribed fire windows and suppression policy. It is designed to run on a personal computer: a 9 400-cell test landscape simulates in about a minute per year, of which EMBER is seconds.
EMBER/
src/ the extension
FireBehavior/ standalone fire behavior library (no LANDIS dependencies)
tests/ xUnit tests for the behavior library
docker/ dev image: the EMBER DLL layered onto a working LANDIS-II v8 image
deploy/installer/ extension registration file
docs/ user guide (Markdown, docx, PDF) and container instructions
calibration/ the calibration record: R scripts, parameter variants, results
testing/ example scenarios (windowed and full Mount Rainier landscape)
docs/
01_LANDIS-II_Architecture_Notes.md how the core, cohort library, NECN, Climate Library
and the existing fire extensions work
02_EMBER_Design.md design: mechanism, inputs, outputs, calibration, roadmap
03_EMBER_Build_Log.md implementation and testing notes
- EMBER user guide — the LANDIS-II format guide: every input parameter, the equations behind them, the output files.
- EMBER/README.md — quick input reference and developer notes.
- Calibration record — how the Mount Rainier parameter set was arrived at, pass by pass, with the R scripts and a section on reusing the workflow on another landscape.
- Container instructions — build the image and run a full landscape from a terminal.
EMBER targets netstandard2.0 and builds against the LANDIS-II v8 libraries (Landis.Core from
the LANDIS-II MyGet feed; the universal cohort, climate, metadata and parameter libraries from
EMBER/src/lib/).
cd EMBER/src && dotnet build EMBER.csproj -c Release
cd ../tests/FireBehavior.Tests && dotnet testEMBER/docker/build.sh builds the DLL and layers it onto an existing LANDIS-II v8 runtime
image, registering the extension without needing an SDK in the image.
- Run outputs. The calibration runs and example scenarios produce tens of gigabytes of
LANDIS-II output.
EMBER/calibration/results/keeps the scored logs, diagnostics and plots of every calibration variant; the raw run folders are ignored. - Pinned upstream clones. Development used exact-commit clones of the LANDIS-II Foundation repositories (core model, NECN succession, SCRPPLE, the cohort and climate libraries) for reference. They are third-party code and are not redistributed here; clone them from github.com/LANDIS-II-Foundation.
- Landscape inputs. The example scenarios reference large Mount Rainier inputs (initial communities, soils, climate, ignition density maps) by path; the parameter files that configure EMBER are included, the landscape rasters are not.
Apache License 2.0, the license used by the LANDIS-II extensions. See LICENSE.
The support libraries in EMBER/src/lib/ are LANDIS-II Foundation binaries redistributed to
build against, and carry their own licenses.
The extension is implemented and tested, with a calibrated parameter set for Mount Rainier
National Park derived against the FPA-FOD, MTBS and GeoMAC records. The full-landscape
comparison against a Social Climate Fire run of the same landscape is in progress. Prescribed
fire, spotting, delayed mortality and hazard/replay modes are on the roadmap in
docs/02_EMBER_Design.md.