The Forest Protection Branch of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources has completed a project to classify forest stands into the forest fuels identified in the Canadian Forest Fire Behaviour Prediction System (FBP). Working with the Forestry GIS Section, this classification was applied to the entire forest inventory to obtain a provincial forest fuels layer, downloadable by county below. This information provides a decision support tool that will help provide fire crews with quantitative forest fire information (rates of spread, intensities, etc.), which in turn will improve safety, initial attack efforts, suppression activities and overall costs.

There are 16 different fuel types recognized in the FBP system. Each fuel type is based primarily on stand structural attributes including percentage of conifer, presence of ladder fuels, densities, crown closures, and crown base heights (CBH).

View an online map of Nova Scotia's Forest Fire Fuel Codes

Downloading Instructions

To download the self-extracting archive (*.exe), place the cursor over the area of interest in the map below and click. Alternatively, place the cursor over the county name hyperlink below the map and click. Save the file to the desired location on your hard drive. Execute the downloaded file on your local computer to decompress the shapefiles - you will be offered the opportunity to select an output folder. You must be using Microsoft Windows. DNR accepts no liability for any errors or deficiencies on this map.

Projection: UTM Zone 20N NAD83

Self-extracting archive contents:

• fueltype.shp (shapefile for chosen county)

Please select the county of interest:

Antigonish	Guyborough	Lunenburg	Queens
Annapolis	Hants	Richmond	Victoria
Cape Breton	Halifax East	St. Marys	Yarmouth
Colchester	Halifax West	Sable I
Cumberland	Inverness	Shelburne
Digby	Kings	Pictou