Restoration and Recovery

USGS WERC’s Dr. Karen Thorne and her research team are using drone imagery to understand how the 2018 Carr Fire affected ecosystems and cultural resources. The study, a collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS), focuses on Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in northern California. The drone images will help the WERC researchers identify changes in topography, cultural sites, debris...

Climate changes and interacting disturbances such as wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, and erosion and flooding can perturb and reorganize ecosystems.

EROS, alongside the USDA Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC), offers rapid delivery of satellite imagery in the form of Burned Area Reflectance Classifications (BARC) and other data to the Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) program.

Land use and unintentional (e.g., wildfire) disturbances are increasingly dominant factors affecting land-use planning and management of semiarid landscapes, particularly in sagebrush steppe rangelands. In the last 10-20 years, wildfires are occurring more frequently and increasingly in very large burn patches.

Land managers have invested considerable funding to decrease fuel loads and restore resilient ecosystems in forests and rangelands, using techniques such as grazing, mowing, herbicides, and thinning. Yet, little information is available about how such restoration activities have influenced wildlife species and habitats. We are conducting empirical studies and developing novel approaches to better...

Mitigation of ecological damage caused by rangeland wildfires focuses on conservation of ecosystem function through reducing soil erosion and spread of invasive plants. The overall effectiveness of these treatments is variable, and their necessity has been debated recently. We conduct research projects and synthesize findings to determine if mitigation treatments: 1) protect ecosystems against...

Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) track critical attributes of the atmosphere, oceanic, and terrestrial systems over time-scales appropriate for analyzing their relationships with climate change. As part of a larger Climate Data Record (CDR) and ECV project, scientists at GECSC are leading the development and validation of the Burned Area ECV algorithm. This algorithm automatically extracts...

Flash flooding can be a destructive and life-threatening response of watersheds to intense rainfall events, particularly in sparsely­ vegetated, or burned watersheds. Studies have been conducted to estimate the magnitude of hydrologic responses of burned watersheds to rainfall events, however the time that it takes a flood to travel through a burned watershed and reach a critical or populated area...