Projecting Wildfire Across Current and Future Landscapes: Comparison of Model Approaches
Project ID: 23-JV-11261958-061
Federal Agency: U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station Partner Institution: University of Oregon Fiscal Year: 2023
Initial Funding: $50,000
Total Funding: $50,000
Principal Investigator: Lucash, Melissa Agreement Technical Representative: Gray, Andrew
Abstract:
Background: The extent and behavior of wildfires has significant impacts on carbon storage in forests, and there are concerns that the recent increases in wildfire in response to western drought will. accelerate with climate change. Ecosystem process models and empirically-based models use a variety of approaches that estimate fire behavior. Understanding how high and low severity areas may be distributed across the landscape will be needed to estimate how carbon stores will be spatially distributed under future management and climate.
This project would build on research initiative syntheses of how wildfire incidence is projected in ecosystem models to compare spatial estimates (maps) of current and future wildfire risk across different analytical and simulation models. Isolating areas of disagreement and agreement would help identify areas of potential fire refugia, reburns, and risk of conversion to nonforest.
Results could also identify areas of large uncertainty where more fieldwork may be needed.
Finding years when the models diverge in projections would help determine the relative sensitivities of the models to climate and suggest avenues for future model development and improvement.
The work involves computer simulation of selected West Coast landscapes under recent historic and multiple projected climate scenarios, using Landis II as the primary model and comparing behavior with results of other models, including those generated by Research Initiative collaborators (c.g., John Kim). Landscapes will be selected to capture the range of vegetation types across Oregon.
The magnitude of the effect of wildfire on forest carbon stocks and the need for fuels management (or lack thereof are contentious issues facing end users that they currently have no clear answers for. This work in combination with other projects under the Research Initiative will inform users on the potential impacts of wildfire and how best to integrate those impacts into projections of the overall forest sector (i.e., forests and wood products).
The research literature on ecosystem carbon modeling is rich, but contradictory, and rarely deals with the range of relevant issues in a balanced manner. A wide range of approaches, from deterministic to non-spatial stochastic to spatially-interactive landscape spread, are used to simulate fire effects, with no clear guidance on their utility.
Managers in the private and public sectors, and policy makers, want to know the carbon implications of their decisions to include in their cost-benefit evaluations.