Image

The state, dynamics, spatial configuration and characteristics of wildland fuels are critical in understanding fire spread and severity in wildland ecosystems. Specifically, ground, surface, and ladder fuels play a significant role in driving both horizontal and vertical fire spread, disproportionately impacting fire severity relative to their biomass when compared with trees. Historically, there has been a challenge in accurately characterizing these fuels, leading to considerable uncertainty in fire spread and fire risk models. This lack of trustworthy fuel maps across forested landscapes has two major sources: a lack of data on subcanopy fuels conducive to calibrating and validating models of the state and dynamics of fuels in a landscape, and a lack of usable direct signal from nearly every remote sensing asset, requiring different mapping approaches beyond standard remote sensing techniques.  Here, we present our efforts to address both the problem of quantifying fuels in-situ for use in larger exercises of mapping fuels across the landscape, as well as approaches towards quantifying those wildland fuels at scale.  

About the Speaker

Dr. Jonathan Greenberg's research centers on addressing questions of the impacts of climate change and land use/land cover change on vegetated ecosystems using remote sensing data. His research ranges across scales from individual plants to the globe, across many terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and utilizes state-of-the-art remote sensing imagery including hyperspectral, hyperspatial, multi-temporal, thermal, and LiDAR data.  Dr. Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science at the University of Nevada, Reno.