Project summary
Wildfires are one of the greatest threats to human infrastructure and the ecosystem services humans value in the western US, but are also necessary in fire-adapted ecosystems. Wildfire activity is widely projected to increase in response to climate change in the Northwest, but we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of what this increase will look like or what its impacts will be on a variety of ecological and hydrologic systems. This project is addressing one critical part of those impacts: the islands of unburned vegetation within wildfires. Unburned islands occur naturally as wildfire burn across landscapes, and are important habitat refuges for species; places where plants and animals survive the fire and subsequently regenerate across the recently burned landscape. Since they are naturally resistant to burning, understanding how climate change impacts these islands will help us understand what species may be in even more from wildfires if these refuges disappear. Studying them and copying their characteristics can also help humans build our homes and communities to be more resistant to wildfire. This project aims to understand and model unburned islands within wildfires to inform both conservation and restoration planning and community wildfire protection planning efforts.
Personnel
Publications
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Funding Source
Northwest Climate Science Center
Data
Database of CBI (composite burn index) field data taken for this project. Data generated using jFIREMON software, data format is ".mdb" (MS Access database file). Please contact me if you have questions when using this data (see contact tab on this website).
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