Project Funding: 2015 - 2016

NRA: 2014 NASA: Rapid Response and Novel Research in Earth Science   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Extensive regions of the Northwest Territories of Canada (NWT) burned in wildfire (3.4 million hectares) during the summer of 2014. While fire in the boreal regions of Canada and Alaska are well-documented, and years of extensive fire have been recorded, 2014 represents the largest burned area for the NWT in recorded history. Because NWT straddles the boundary between the rocky landscapes of the Canadian Shield and more homogeneous landscapes of the Taiga Plains to the west, NWT has a diversity of wetland/peatland types, and some very different upland forests than Alaska. We propose to capture data on the post fire environment in a cross section of these fire-disturbed sites in the summer of 2015, within one year of the events. The goal of this project is to identify and collect remote sensing and field data to support the science necessary to investigate the impacts and consequences of the 2014 fires in Northwest Territories, Canada. Specific objectives of this project include: 1. Identify the relevant data needed to study the influence of the 2014 fires on site ecology, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and land management. (Jan) 2. Create a map of wetlands for the region with remote sensing to target a variety of ecosystem types and severity conditions. (Jan ­ Mar) 3. Plan, collect, and catalog remote sensing and field data to address the questions agreed upon by the multi-national science community. (Mar ­ Dec) A workshop planned for January 2015 in Yellowknife, NWT will provide guidance for data collections that will be useful for a variety of science. Using methods developed in previous NASA Terrestrial Ecology projects, a map of landcover including delineation of wetland and peatland type across the region will be created. This will be a preliminary classification using remote sensing imagery without extensive field data (unsupervised classification) for identifying potential study sites for field collections. The bulk of the proposed work will be to collect field and remote sensing in the spring and summer of 2015 to capture the immediate post-fire environment in these sites.

Publications:

Bourgeau-Chavez, L. L., Graham, J. A., Vander Bilt, D. J. L., Battaglia, M. J. 2022. Assessing the broadscale effects of wildfire under extreme drought conditions to boreal peatlands. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. 5. DOI: 10.3389/ffgc.2022.965605

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile
• North American Carbon Program (NACP) Project Profile
• NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) Project Profile