Getting started with FastFuels

FastFuels is a cloud service that builds the 3D fuel data physics-based wildfire models need. Draw an area on a map, and it hands back the trees, surface fuels, and terrain across it — voxelized, georeferenced, and ready to run in QUIC-Fire, FIRETEC, or FDS.

Nothing runs on your machine. FastFuels keeps the source data — LANDFIRE, 3DEP, TreeMap, NAIP canopy height, OpenStreetMap — on its own servers, and does the fetching, clipping, and fuel science for you. There’s no national dataset to download, and no geospatial toolchain to install.

There are two ways in. You can click through a web application in your browser, or call a REST API from your own code. Both reach the same service, so a domain you draw in the browser today is the same one your script reads back tomorrow. You can start with either and switch whenever you like.

Either way, the work is the same three steps:

1. Draw an area. A polygon on a map, called a domain. Everything you build lives inside it.

2. Add the fuels you need. Trees, surface fuel, terrain, and the roads and water that break them up.

3. Export. Download the files your fire model reads.

Which should you use?

It comes down to how much you’re building, and whether you want to write code.

Web application

Click through it in your browser.

Choose this if you:

• would rather not write code
• are building a handful of areas, not hundreds
• want to see the fuelbed in 3D as you build it
• just need an API key

Create your first domain →

API

Call it from a script, in any language.

Choose this if you:

• are building many areas, or re-running as the data changes
• need the workflow reproducible, or inside a pipeline
• want parameters the interface doesn’t expose
• are bringing your own trees, rasters, or lidar

Start with the API →

Not sure? Start with the web application. You’ll need it to mint an API key either way, and it’s the quickest way to see what a fuelbed actually is before you automate building them. Most people end up using both: the browser to look, the API to scale.

Finding your way around

The sidebar groups everything by what you’re trying to do:

• Tutorials walk you through a complete piece of work, step by step. Start here if you’re new.
• How-to guides are recipes for one specific task, for when you know roughly what you’re doing.
• Explanation covers how the system works, and why it works that way.

For the exact fields on every endpoint, the API publishes its own reference at /docs. It’s generated by the running service, so it never drifts out of date.