Balancing economic, ecological, and social values has long been a challenge in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where conflict over timber harvest and old-growth habitat on public lands has been contentious for the past several decades.
Disturbance is a key influence on forest carbon dynamics, but the complexity of spatial and temporal patterns in forest disturbance makes it difficult to quantify their impacts on carbon flux over broad spatial domains.Here we used a time series of Landsat remote sensing images and a climate-driven carbon cycle process model to evaluate carbon fluxes at the ecoregion scale in western Oregon.
High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires.
Fuel consumption specifies the amount of vegetative biomass consumed during wildland fire. It is a two-stage process of pyrolysis and combustion that occurs simultaneously and at different rates depending on the characteristics and condition of the fuel, weather, topography, and in the case of prescribed fire, ignition rate and pattern.
White ash results from the complete combustion of surface fuels, making it a logically simple retrospective indicator of surface fuel consumption. However, the strength of this relationship has been neither tested nor adequately demonstrated with field measurements.
An important consideration in forest management to mitigate climate change is the balance between forest carbon (C) storage and ecological sustainability.
Wood bioenergy is touted as carbon neutral because biological regrowth recaptures the carbon released in energy production. However, some argue that using wood as an energy feedstock will result in decreased forest stocks and thereby a net reduction of carbon sequestered by forests.
Using forests to sequester carbon in response to anthropogenically induced climate change is being considered across the globe. A recent U.S. executive order mandated that all federal agencies account for sequestration and emissions of greenhouse gases, highlighting the importance of understanding how forest carbon stocks are influenced by wildfire.
Comparing biosphereatmosphere carbon exchange across monsoon (warm-season rainfall) and Mediterranean (cool-season rainfall) regimes can yield information about the interaction between energy and water limitation.