Free Software for the Wildland Fire Community

SEM has been developing wildland fire management software since 1977.

Explore and download free software and documentation co-developed by SEM from our partner agency sites.

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SEM Mission and Services


SEM was founded in Missoula, MT in 1977 as a nonprofit research and educational organization. Our mission is to help advance understanding of the behavior, effects, management, and role of wildland fire by partnering with fire management agencies to:

  • perform basic and applied research,
  • develop research and management tools, and
  • provide technical transfer through documentation, publications, workshops, conferences, and the web.

While our online tools, downloadable software, and documentation are freely available to all, their intended audience is primarily the community of professional wildland fire managers and planners.

Software from Our Partners

Software from Our Partners

The following software products were sponsored by various federal fire management agencies and developed in cooperation with Systems for Environmental Management:


BehavePlus: A Wildland Fire Modeling System

The BehavePlus fire modeling system is a Windows® based computer program that can be used for any fire management application that involves modeling fire behavior and some fire effects. The system is composed of a collection of mathematical models that describe fire behavior and the fire environment. The program simulates rate of fire spread, spotting distance, scorch height, tree mortality, fuel moisture, wind adjustment factor, as well as other variables; so it is used to predict fire behavior in multiple situations.

FARSITE: 2-Dimensional Fire Growth Simulator

FARSITE is a fire growth simulation modeling system. It uses spatial information on topography and fuels along with weather and wind files. It incorporates existing models for surface fire, crown fire, spotting, post-frontal combustion, and fire acceleration into a 2-dimensional fire growth model.

FireFamilyPlus: Fire Weather/Climate/Danger Analysis

FireFamilyPlus is a Windows software application that supports the analysis of fire weather, fire danger, fire climate, and fire occurrence data required by fire managers to successfully use the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS).

FIREMON: Fire Effects Monitoring & Inventory System

FIREMON (Fire Effects Monitoring and Inventory System) is an agency independent plot level sampling system designed to characterize changes in ecosystem attributes over time.

FLAMMAP: Fire Behavior within a Map Grid

FlamMap is a fire behavior mapping and analysis program that computes potential fire behavior characteristics (spread rate, flame length, fireline intensity, etc)

FOFEM: A First Order Fire Effects Model

FOFEM (a First Order Fire Effects Model) is a computer program for predicting tree mortality, fuel consumption, smoke production, and soil heating caused by prescribed fire or wildfire.

FEIS: The Fire Effects Information System

The Fire effects Information System is an online collection of reviews of the scientific literature about fire effects on plants and animals and about fire regimes of plant communities in the United States.

ArcFuels: An ArcMap Toolbar

ArcFuels is a toolbar implemented in ArcMap which creates a trans-scale (stand to large landscape) interface to apply pre-existing forest growth (e.g., Forest Vegetation Simulator) and fire behavior models (e.g., FlamMap) to aid in vegetation management, fuel treatment planning, wildfire behavior modeling, and wildfire risk assessments.

WFIS: Wildland Fire Information system

The Wildland Fire Assessment System

Contact Information


If you have questions about Systems for Environmental Management, please contact:

Collin D. Bevins
Executive Director
808 Woodford St
Missoula, MT 59801

US (406) 360-5673

cbevins@montana.com