Project Summary
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Post-fire landscapes have been transforming in recent decades due to changing fire patterns and pre- and post-fire management activities. The changing patch mosaics and structure characteristics within immediate post-fire environments can have important implications for ecosystem recoveries, carbon dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and habitat use by wildlife species of conservation importance. For instance, recent studies have begun to examine the role of post-disturbance forests as habitat for a federally threatened forest carnivore, the Canada lynx. Incorporating additional structure information within post-fire habitat assessments would advance the current understanding of species responses which are directly relevant to post-fire management planning and conservation efforts. Spaceborne lidar from GEDI paired with additional satellite-based data have the potential to characterize post-fire structure and changes related to fire events across broad extents. Recent studies have found promise in GEDI-fusion frameworks for scaling up the valuable structure information from GEDI to continuous extents of value to a range of wildlife species. The novel landscapes and structures represented by post-fire environments, and their importance to a range of ecosystem services and management planning, warrants a deeper evaluation of the strengths and limitations of GEDI-fusion frameworks for characterizing structure patterns within post-fire areas and the value of that information for improving our understanding of habitat use by federally listed species. The overall aim of our proposal is to build on our past and current work by quantifying errors and biases of our GEDI-fusion products from our phase-I GEDI project and testing model improvements within our GEDI-fusion frameworks in post-fire landscapes of the Rocky Mountain Region. We will incorporate the tested and improved GEDI-fusion products, within habitat evaluations for the threatened carnivore, the Canada lynx, to better understand how the species utilize postfire landscapes, including patches of refugia.
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Research Objectives
Objective 1Conduct validation of our existing phase-I GEDI-fusion maps within early post-fire landscapes and test approaches for model improvements and the performance of expanded temporal mapping extents.
Objective 2Investigate additional GEDI-informed spatial products of value to characterizing post-fire habitat relationships and responses to landscape changes (e.g., structure driven severity mapping, identification of green tree refugia, and developing understory indicators).
Objective 3As a case study, incorporate the resulting post-fire structure information into habitat-behavior modeling for a federally listed species, the Canada lynx, to inform how GEDI products aid in understanding structure driven behavior across immediate post-fire landscapes as well as specifically within low severity forest refugia patches.
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Project Outputs
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Publications
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Spatial Data Products
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Project Team & Funding
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Collaborators
Dr. Joseph Holbrook - University of Wyoming (Co-I)
Dr. Kerri Vierling - University of Idaho (Collaboration) |
Funding Agency
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