Imaging spectroscopy of boreal vegetation to aid fire risk assessment, Alaska
Abstract
Imaging spectroscopy is ideal for improved vegetation mapping and quantifying biophysical properties such as biomass, canopy moisture content, and flammability to aid fire risk assessment. As part of a recently funded NSF EPSCoR grant "Fire and Ice: Navigating variability in boreal wildfire regimes and subarctic coastal ecosystems" we are employing imaging spectroscopy for improved characterization of Alaska's boreal forest fuel including amount, flammability, and moisture content. Because the availability of hyperspectral data is limited to a small percentage of Alaska's boreal region, we are developing algorithms to scale up the improved fuel map from local experiment sites to the entire boreal forest of Alaska (~284,000 square miles). We will present vegetation mapping results from NASA AVIRIS-NG data collected in July 2018 as part of the NASA ABoVE campaign over three experimental sites in interior Alaska: Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest, Caribou-Poker Research Watershed, and University of Alaska Fairbanks North Campus. These sites encompass the diversity of fire fuel and burned history representative of broader boreal domain. We collected plot scale (10 square meters) vegetation composition data at 108 sites including in situ spectra of trees, shrubs, and graminoids using PSR+ 3500 Spectrometer during May - July, 2019 to develop a robust training/testing dataset for vegetation/wildfire fuel mapping. The final outcome will be improved fuel maps and fire risk data sets for the experimental sites at finer scale (5 m).
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC51E1121M
- Keywords:
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- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4217 Coastal processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL