Research Database
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Multitemporal LiDAR improves estimates of fire severity in forested landscapes
Year: 2018
Landsat-based fire severity maps have limited ecological resolution, which can hinder assessments of change to specific resources. Therefore, we evaluated the use of pre- and post-fire LiDAR, and combined LiDAR with Landsat-based relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR) estimates, to increase the accuracy and resolution of basal area mortality estimation. We vertically segmented point clouds and performed model selection on spectral and spatial pre- and post-fire LiDAR metrics and their absolute differences. Our best multitemporal LiDAR model included change in mean intensity values…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and tree death: understanding and improving modeling of fire-induced tree mortality
Year: 2018
Each year wildland fires kill and injure trees on millions of forested hectares globally, affecting plant and animal biodiversity, carbon storage, hydrologic processes, and ecosystem services. The underlying mechanisms of fire-caused tree mortality remain poorly understood, however, limiting the ability to accurately predict mortality and develop robust modeling applications, especially under novel future climates. Virtually all post-fire tree mortality prediction systems are based on the same underlying empirical model described in Ryan and Reinhardt (1988 Can. J. For. Res. 18 1291–7), which…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatiotemporal patterns of unburned areas within fire perimeters in the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014
Year: 2018
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Refugia: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter for Global Change?
Year: 2018
Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales, and affected taxa, they have not been characterized systematically over space and time, which is crucial for understanding their role in facilitating resilience in the context of global change. We identify four dichotomies that delineate an overarching conceptual framework of fire refugia: unburned versus lower severity, species-specific versus…
Publication Type: Journal Article