Terrestrial Laser Scan Metrics Predict Surface Vegetation Biomass and Consumption in a Frequently Burned Southeastern U.S. Ecosystem

Fire

article

Eva Louise Loudermilk¹  Scott Pokswinski²  Christie M. Hawley¹  Aaron Maxwell³  Michael R. Gallagher⁴  Nicholas S. Skowronski⁴  Andrew T. Hudak⁵  Chad Hoffman⁶  John Kevin Hiers⁷ 

[1] USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Athens Prescribed Fire Laboratory;New Mexico Consortium, Center for Applied Fire and Ecosystems Science;Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University;USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Climate, Fire, and Carbon Cycle Sciences;USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory;Warner College of Natural Resources, Colorado State University;Natural Resources Institute, Texas A&M University

关键词: terrestrial laser scanning;    biomass;    consumption;    longleaf pine;    prescribed fire;    fuel heterogeneity;    fire behavior;    linear modeling;    forest;    wildland fire;   

DOI  :  10.3390/fire6040151

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Fire-prone landscapes found throughout the world are increasingly managed with prescribed fire for a variety of objectives. These frequent low-intensity fires directly impact lower forest strata, and thus estimating surface fuels or understory vegetation is essential for planning, evaluating, and monitoring management strategies and studying fire behavior and effects. Traditional fuel estimation methods can be applied to stand-level and canopy fuel loading; however, local-scale understory biomass remains challenging because of complex within-stand heterogeneity and fast recovery post-fire. Previous studies have demonstrated how single location terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to estimate plot-level vegetation characteristics and the impacts of prescribed fire. To build upon this methodology, co-located single TLS scans and physical biomass measurements were used to generate linear models for predicting understory vegetation and fuel biomass, as well as consumption by fire in a southeastern U.S. pineland. A variable selection method was used to select the six most important TLS-derived structural metrics for each linear model, where the model fit ranged in R2 from 0.61 to 0.74. This study highlights prospects for efficiently estimating vegetation and fuel characteristics that are relevant to prescribed burning via the integration of a single-scan TLS method that is adaptable by managers and relevant for coupled fire–atmosphere models.

【 授权许可】

CC BY