Geography Colloquium: Measuring forest structure-disturbance interactions in western US forests

Dr. Emily Francis Assistant Professor of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship Warner College of Natural Resources Colorado State University Abstract: In recent decades, large high-severity wildfires have occurred across a diverse set of forest types and climatic settings in the western US. In forests where fire suppression has led to widespread fuel accumulation, dynamic and up to date maps of forest structure and fuel conditions could support efforts to scale fuel management activities to reduce fire severity and delay climate-driven type conversion. In this talk, I will discuss a semi-automated system we have developed to monitor forest structure and fuel conditions in northern New Mexico and the Colorado Front Range. The system upscales airborne lidar-derived measurements of forest structure over space and time with Sentinel-1 backscatter and Sentinel-2 imagery. Efforts to use the system to monitor effects of thinning and prescribed fire treatments on forest structure and quantify fire-...