Using LiDAR to Determine the Relationship between Fire History and Forest Structure at Crater Lake National Park
Project ID: J8W07110013
Federal Agency: National Park Service
Partner Institution: University of Washington
Fiscal Year: 2011
Initial Funding: $30,000
Total Funding: $40,208
Project Type: Research
Project Disciplines: Biological
National Park: Crater Lake National Park
Principal Investigator: Franklin, Jerry
Agreement Technical Representative: Holm, Greg
Abstract: There is a strong need at Crater Lake National Park and other forested areas to quantify long-term effects of fire on forest structure across broad spatial scales to facilitate the development and evaluation of fire management objectives. The goal of this collaborative project is to use existing LiDAR data to understand how time-since-fire (TSF) and fire severity controls patterns of forest structure development across elevation and compositional gradients. Our specific objectives are to: (1) determine how post-fire development of forest structure varies along gradients of elevation, fire severity, and TSF by directly mapping stand development stage, canopy height, height to live crown, canopy vertical structure, basal area, and gap and patch size; (2) compare forest and patch structures created by contemporary wildland fires with pre-20th century fires; and (3) develop park-wide atlases of fire severity measurements and forest structural attributes. This project directly addresses three key impediments related to the successful implementation and monitoring of fires for resource objectives. First, data will provide the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of contemporary fires at restoring and/or maintaining landscape-scale forest structures. Secondly, it allows fire managers to develop relationships between burn severity signatures and long-term successional probabilities for modeling future landscape patterns. Third, spatially explicit data on forest structure will be useful for managing for a wide variety of resource goals such as wildlife habitat or watershed health for endangered fisheries. The products include spatial data layers, statistical descriptions of relationships among structural attributes, fire severity, time since fire, and forest type, a final report, and one or more scientific journal articles. This project has several public benefits, including advancing our understanding about post-fire forest structure development in relation to abiotic and fire variables, determining how well the use of fine-scale remotely sensed data can be used to map forest structure in relation to fire history, and producing detailed maps of current forest structure to support forest and wildlife habitat conservation.
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