Fire Refugia Monitoring and Applications

Project ID: 25-CS-11062756-372

Federal Agency: U.S. Forest Service National Forest System

Partner Institution: Oregon State University

Fiscal Year: 2025

Initial Funding: $140,027

Total Funding: $140,027

Principal Investigator: Krawchuk, Meg

Agreement Technical Representative: Davis, Ray

Abstract: 

Forest managers’ demand for digital (GIS -geographic information system) maps of current forest landscape conditions and how they are changing (near real-time) because of increasing wildfires has increased in recent years. Forest managers are interested in annual time-series of forest structure/composition maps, including maps representing concepts of ‘fire refugia’ (areas that normally burn less severely than the surrounding landscape) to inform fire-resilient forest planning and management in the context of increasing wildfires. There is a need to rapidly and accurately represent fire refugia at an annual cadence, both to provide methods for quantifying change and to increase the accuracy of maps representing the current forest status. In this agreement, we propose augmenting existing mapping workflows to accelerate the generation of updated maps of forest vegetation and fire refugia to understand status and trends of these conditions in forests of the Pacific Northwest.